


Lacuna

by morpholomeg



Series: Morphology, or a matter of circumstance [1]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Daemons, Gen, What Happened in Budapest, dæmon!fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-05
Updated: 2015-04-05
Packaged: 2018-03-19 06:04:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 29,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3599160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morpholomeg/pseuds/morpholomeg
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There were many rumours about the Black Widow, some of which might even have been true. The most reliable of these were presented to Clint in maybe the sketchiest mission briefing he'd ever received, full of words like 'allegedly' and 'probably' and 'although it seems unlikely' which seemed out of place in a SHIELD file. There was only one piece of information that truly surprised him.</p><p>"We seriously don't know what her dæmon is, sir?" he asked Coulson.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for MCU canon-typical violence and death, for attempted suicide, for allusions to altered memories/brainwashing (Natasha's past), and for mentions of dæmon-related violence and abuse. See end notes for specific, spoilery warnings.
> 
> Thank you to the wonderful silverluminosity for beta-reading. Any remaining mistakes are my own.

There were many rumours about the Black Widow, some of which might even have been true. The most reliable of these were presented to Clint in maybe the sketchiest mission briefing he'd ever received, crammed full of words like 'allegedly' and 'probably' and 'although it seems unlikely', out of place in a SHIELD file. Few things were a shock to him these days, but as he skimmed over the children's hospital she'd scorched, the descriptions of the torture she'd wrought, and the extent of her connections in the underworld, there was one piece of information that truly surprised him.

"We seriously don't know what her dæmon is, sir?" he asked Coulson.

Coulson’s eyebrow twitched. "She's been seen with many. Touching them, even. The best theory we have is not one we're willing to write down."

Clint looked up sharply. "Which is?"

"That the Red Room severed all its operatives and sent them out with each other's dæmons."

Reflexively, Clint reached out for Thea, and she hopped onto his lap, long black ears twitching. Even Coulson’s badger dæmon was showing some agitation, her claws digging into the chair she was perched on.

“You can’t be too worried about copycats though, can you?” Clint asked. “I mean, even if they did have their own guillotine, surely there aren’t that many people who could even function after…”

“And yet,” Coulson said, “of the people who apparently can, our primary example is Natalia Romanova.”

Murderess, assassin, killer of dæmons. Thea’s fur bristled under Clint’s hand.

“Clint.”

The use of his first name made him look up. “Sir.”

“This won’t be an easy kill,” Coulson warned. “Romanova is utterly without limits. She will go straight for Thea if she thinks it will help."

Clint and Thea exchanged a glance. A jackrabbit wasn't completely helpless - at the very least, Thea was quick as lightning - but there was a reason they prefered a sniper's perch to hand-to-hand combat. In this business, the people who survived tended to have dæmons who could take another dæmon down. No one ever considered whether a dæmon's form made them vulnerable to a human, though; maybe the sickest, vilest people would touch someone else's dæmon, but it would take something completely inhuman to actually set out to kill another person's soul.

"Even without that consideration," Coulson continued, "you should know that we’ve sent out six other agents in the last year, of whom she killed four and seriously injured the other two.” He leaned forward a fraction of an inch. “You do not have to take this mission.”

Clint raised an eyebrow.

Two days later, he was on a plane to Kiev.

~

He caught sight of her five times over the course of three days, but never in a place where he would be able to take her down - the middle of a busy street, inside a crowded shopping centre, tucked into a corner of a small café from which she seemed to disappear until he noticed the tiny window in the ladies’ bathroom. Her hair was bright red, long and poker straight, artificially so, and she was a little smaller than he’d expected, dainty and petite. Part of that was down to the way she dressed; she was clearly going out of her way to signal ‘harmless’, dressed in pastel shades and flowy fabrics, happily baring clear white skin to the spring sunshine. Only once did he see her wearing jeans, and even then they were a washed-out, pretty blue and paired with a pink chemise. She was with the same dæmon each time: a butterfly which perched cheerfully in her hair or on her shoulder, fluttering alongside her as she walked.

Clint was perplexed.

“Okay, two problems with your theory, sir,” he said to Coulson over a secure line on the evening of the second day. “First, that dæmon is way too happy touching her. They’re in contact exactly the same amount as a regular person.”

“That could still be down to their training, desensitisation from the procedure-”

“Sure, but second, what Red Room operative has a butterfly dæmon? You guys thought twice about hiring _me_ , and Thea's way less vulnerable than a goddamn butterfly.”

“Maybe they’re less prejudiced than us. They also have a higher proportion of female operatives.”

Clint snorted. “That’s sweet.”

“Hawkeye, focus. Next time you see her, you get me online and you take her down.”

“Even if there’s a risk to civilians, sir?”

There was no hesitation on the other end. “Try to minimise that.”

But not eliminate. The schedule must have been pushed up. “Copy that.”

He never would learn precisely how she got into the safe house, less still how she got all the way into his bedroom before he woke up. He went from sleeping to fighting in one breathless instant - gun under his pillow, knocked from his hand, bright red hair in his face, the jab of a knife to his left arm, block, block, the knife embedding into the wall at the far side of the room Romanova leaping onto the mattress and somehow ending up behind him, chokehold, another knife at his throat -

“So, the Amazing Hawkeye,” she murmured in his ear.

But why would she do that, why delay when he had -

The arrow he had picked up as she was moving around him jabbed upwards, through her armpit, and the knife skimmed his throat as her arm jerked away. She cried out, stumbling backwards - but not towards the door, not towards the window what the hell was she doing - as he grabbed his bow and another arrow, nocked it, drew -

And there was the butterfly, fluttering off to his left in his peripheral, the goddamn butterfly dæmon. Thea saw it at the same time and leapt to pin it down - even a hare could kill a butterfly - and then it changed.

Clint blinked - that couldn’t be possible, no adult dæmon could change - but there it was, a red fox now, fleeing towards Romanova.

“The fuck?” Clint blurted out. “How old are you?”

“Old enough,” she snarled.

But the fox was pushing at Romanova’s heels - why the fuck wasn’t it attacking Thea - and speaking to her in Russian. “Нет, Наташа, нет, нет.”

“What do you mean, no?” Thea demanded. “You’re telling her no, why are you telling her no?”

And then it clicked in Clint’s head. “Is this a suicide?”

“Shut up!” Romanova roared.

“All those times you let me see you the last few days - you knew I was there, you know who I am, you were planning how to do this without anyone working it out.”

“Stop her,” the fox begged. “Don’t kill us.”

“Заткнись!” she snapped. “Shut up, shut up!”

And then she kicked the fox dæmon clear across the room. It - she? - hit the wall with a yowl of pain, and Romanova flinched. God, it was her dæmon, and it changed again, into a hare no less, not a jackrabbit like Thea but a European brown hare. It loped towards Thea, who leaned up onto her hind legs, ready to fight, but the brown hare stayed down, kept its ears low, and said only, “Please.”

“Кacyм, стоп!”

Clint stared at this woman, this impossible child-assassin with one of his arrowheads buried under her skin, and made a call. “I’m going to give you a choice,” he said.

~

Natasha Romanoff’s newly updated file read like a fairy tale, but one written by the Brothers Grimm. Stolen from her parents too early to remember them, her earliest memories were of training in a facility she alternately called the Red Room and Department X. The file did not mention what that training was, Phil noted. By the time she was an adult, she had escaped from them and reinvented herself as a solo operative, taking the jobs no one else wanted, the jobs no one else could complete. It was implied that the Red Room had tried to recapture her several times, but Romanoff could not recall ever returning to the Department.

But those memories could not be trusted; even given that Romanoff could well have been lying to them, she had gaping holes in her mind. She had no idea how old she was, could speak seventeen languages but only remembered learning nine, and remembered years of instruction at the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet just as strongly as she remembered years of training in the Red Room.

Her interrogator, a young woman named Maria Hill, had pointed out that it was impossible for her to have done both. Romanoff’s reaction was recorded verbatim: “I’m aware of that.”

She remembered Stalin’s death in 1953; she remembered the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989; she remembered missions with a man she would only call Зимний Солдат, the Winter Soldier, in 1962, in 1974, in 1991. They wrote him down as a myth, or a series of myths, and didn’t trouble themselves too much about how very real the woman in front of them was.

Her self-reported kill total ran into the hundreds, spanning continents, decades, every shade of the political spectrum, all races, all genders, all ages. Her youngest victim was just over a year old; her oldest, in his nineties. She had tortured dozens. She had not only touched other people’s dæmons, but held them, hurt them, even killed them when their humans had been out of reach.

Hill had requested a day’s reprieve after that session, her frog dæmon shaking and dehydrated in his human’s hands. “She’s inhuman,” she'd said to Phil. “How the hell do we rehabilitate that?”

Phil turned the page.

The next day, Hill had requisitioned a lie detector and gone in with more present tense questions prepared.

“Why are you here?”

“Because Hawkeye offered to bring me.”

“Why did you accept?”

“Because it was this or death, and Cassum didn’t want to die.”

The fact that the wound Barton had given her healed in under a fortnight was alarming, but the strangest and most unthinkable thing about the Black Widow was her dæmon. The woman had taken the opportunity to change her name upon defecting, swapping Natalia for the diminutive Natasha and the feminised form Romanova for an anglicised neutral Romanoff, but the dæmon had agreed only to a transliteration, and so Кacyм became Cassum.

“Chasm, I think she said,” reported Agent Barton when he was first informing HQ that he was bringing in the Black Widow. “Uh, still whole, and she’s not settled.”

“Is her emotional state relevant?” Coulson had asked, voice tight.

“No, I mean that her form is not settled. She still changes, sir.”

It had taken a lot for SHIELD to believe that Romanoff hadn’t somehow kidnapped a child’s dæmon to keep up this charade. However old the woman might be, she clearly was past puberty; it was an impossibility for her to have an unsettled dæmon, and yet there she was. True to Barton’s word, she wasn’t severed, either, although at least two psychologists said that the dæmon’s emotional control was unparalleled for an entire person. They ran scan after scan to try to prove that Cassum was someone else’s, and only an edict from Fury himself stopped them trying to physically pull them apart.

As for the why, Romanoff didn’t know, or so she claimed. The psychologists had their theories, as did the biologists, but as Phil read through them, he found them less than convincing. The best report he got was Barton’s, after he’d observed one of her interrogation sessions through a one-way mirror. An hour in, he stormed out, arriving in Phil’s office without so much as a knock.

“She’s fucked up as a fruitcake,” he said shortly.

“Afternoon, Agent Barton,” Phil said drily. Alevrie looked down from the cushioned seat next to the desk where she customarily sat, levelling a disdainful look at Barton’s dæmon, but Clint ignored them both .

“She’s suicidal. Or she was, a month ago, but concerned enough about her reputation that she wanted me specifically to kill her. She’s never had any control over her own life or body, and I bet she wouldn’t have a clue what to do with it either.”

Phil raised an eyebrow. “And yet you felt the need to bring her home like a stray rabid wolf.”

Alevrie was grumbling low in her belly, and Thea drew her ears straight up in response, poised stock-still at Barton’s side.

“Sir, is this going to be a problem?”

Phil sighed. “No, Barton. I’m not going to get you killed in the field because I believe you made the wrong call.”

“That’s not what I mean. You and me, are we okay?”

He frowned. “We’re not friends, Barton.”

Barton nodded sharply. “Not okay then. Right.”

Phil could feel a tug from Alevrie as they watched him move towards the door, but Thea turned away from her human. In one giant leap, she landed on Phil’s desk; Phil drew back automatically.

“You made a call about us,” Thea said.

Phil couldn’t remember ever hearing her speak in a non-emergency situation.

“Thea,” said Barton, arrested by the door.

“You decided we were worth saving, that we could be useful to you, even though we fight with an antiquated weapon, and we’d been on the wrong side of the tracks for years, and we’re just carnie trash, and I’m a goddamn rabbit.”

“Hare,” Alevrie muttered.

Barton snorted.

“We’re telling you she’s worth saving,” said Thea. “Because if she’s not, then-”

“Thea!” Barton barked.

She jumped back towards him, and the two of them scarpered. Phil dropped his head into his hands.

“They believe they’re as bad as Romanova.”

“Romanoff,” Alevrie corrected.

“And you can stop with that,” Phil told her. “We all know she’s a goddamn hare.”

Alevrie brushed a paw over her nose. “Think Barton could get anything more from Romanoff?”

“I think Romanoff could destroy him without thinking about it,” Phil said.

“And are we going to warn him about that?” she asked.

Phil sighed. “He won’t be seeing her until she’s released. Though I bet Nick makes him her chaperone, delayed probation.”

“Also because he’s one of the few people who might stand a chance at taking her down,” Alevrie pointed out. She paused. “We could demand some sort of protection for him.”

“Stop, Ally.”

“It’s not irrational, it’s a perfectly legitimate request. Phil, we need to keep-”

“We need to work out what the hell to do with Romanoff, that’s what we need to do.”

~

The first time Natasha met Director Fury was after her last evaluation before being allowed to join a training regimen, six weeks after Barton brought her in. His jaguar dæmon stalked beside him, big yellow eyes focused squarely on Cassum where she perched on Natasha’s shoulder. She was a bird today, a swift. Natasha thought it was a good compromise between wanting to appear as harmless as possible and accepting that going too far would only raise the director’s suspicions. Of course, the gesture didn’t mean as much given that the director knew Cassum could change forms; they hated having given up that advantage, now that they thought they might live.

“You got a preference for a fighting form?” Fury asked Cassum.

They didn’t let the oddness of him addressing the dæmon directly faze them.

“Not particularly,” Cassum said, her voice steady.

Natasha kept her face perfectly blank.

Fury nodded. “That case, as far as everyone knows, you’re a European hornet. Show me.”

The pressure on Natasha’s shoulder lightened abruptly, and she heard a buzzing by her left ear. She didn’t look.

The director looked satisfied. “Right now, you’re a pest, Romanova,” he told her, “and I’m gonna treat you like one.”

“Understood.”

“That being said, you got some good people vouching for you. They say you can be useful to this organisation. You prove that, and I’ll consider treating you like an asset.”

Natasha said nothing.

“Now,” Fury barked, “you better get reacquainted with your new personal guard.” He rapped on the door, and it opened to reveal Hawkeye and his hare dæmon.

The hare bounded into the room and stopped, eyes fixed on Cassum.

"Huh," said Hawkeye. "So that's the play."

Natasha raised an eyebrow.

"Don't know what you mean," Fury said archly. "Probationary Agent Romanoff's done an admirable job of hiding her dæmon's form in the past."

Hawkeye rolled his eyes. “Sure.”

But Fury fixed him with a glare, and his dæmon’s tail flicked, once. “You’re not in my good books either, Barton. She fucks up, I take it out on your whole damn team, you got that?”

Just like that, the humour dissolved. Natasha thought ‘team’ might be a euphemism for something else - she knew Hawkeye was a sniper, worked mostly alone, and it didn’t seem to be an idle threat. Hawkeye didn’t click his heels together or salute, but it looked like a close thing. “Yes, sir.”

Fury sniffed, and left. Natasha watched him and his jaguar go, leaving Cassum to keep an eye on Barton and his dæmon. Her buzzing grew louder until she landed on top of Natasha’s left ear. “She’s feeling awkward,” she muttered in Russian.

Natasha snapped her gaze to Barton, who was at relative ease.  He had on a professional smile, obviously fake but a reasonable cover for his real emotions. He was good at this too, then, for certain standards of good. Useful to know.

“So, I guess I’m your babysitter for the foreseeable future,” he said. “You’re staying with me in barracks, but I’ve swung a pretty isolated set of rooms. Well. Borrowed them.”

“For whose protection?” Natasha asked.

Barton shrugged. Interesting. He waved a hand at Cassum.

“Is this a twenty four seven thing, then?” he asked.

“Director’s orders,” she answered.

“Not actually an answer.”

He really wasn’t too bad. She conceded the point. “Fury didn’t say so outright, but given that he wants everyone to believe it…”

“Yeah.”

Well, there were worse forms to be forced into, she thought. A hornet at least had a reputation for causing pain; humiliation hadn’t been his aim. The fact that Cassum was now essentially useless in terms of fighting other dæmons was not lost on her, though. He was trying to limit her without actually disadvantaging her; most enemy dæmons would have just as hard a time fighting a hornet as a hornet would have fighting them.

“Right, then,” said Barton. “Hungry?”

She didn’t want to answer; she wanted to obfuscate. She’d spent the last month and a half spilling almost all her secrets to that Hill woman and that was bad enough, but this was a second life. That moment with Hawkeye’s arrow pointed at her eye and another jabbed into her armpit, that had been a death of sorts. Her old secrets belonged to Natalia Romanova, not Natasha Romanoff.

It took more effort than it should to just say, “Yes.”

The hare - jackrabbit? That was the American breed, she thought - perked up and moved towards the door. Natasha stood up, slowly, telegraphing her moves and being obvious enough about it that Barton might feel patronised, but she received no reaction.

“We’re going to the canteen,” he told her. “People should leave us alone, probably, but you know they’ll be gossiping.”

She moved to follow him out of the door, but he stood aside to let her through first. It was a chivalrous move which had been turned against her in the past, and sure enough he kept a half-step behind her as they moved into the corridor. He was being at least a little cautious then.

“What do they know?” she asked.

“Well, clearance levels four and up have all probably heard of the Black Widow,” he said. She already knew she had to find out how the clearance levels functioned, and didn’t ask more. “Levels five and up know I brought you in. There’s only five people who know everything though - me, you, Fury, Hill and Coulson.”

“Coulson’s your handler,” she asserted. He had mentioned the name in the immediate aftermath of that moment in Kiev.

“Yours too, once you stick out the training programme for long enough,” Barton confirmed.

She nodded, memorising the route as she went. She’d been kept on the same two floors for the last six weeks, escorted anywhere and everywhere under heavy guard, but now they were taking the elevator down to the first floor. The Triskelion’s jail cells were in the centre of the building, so as to better surround any escapees, and the elevator ride gave her a beautiful view of Washington D.C. She watched Barton’s reflection in the window.

“Weird being in the American capital?” he asked.

That didn’t deserve an answer, so she didn’t give one.

The elevator stopped halfway to let a couple of employees in - officewear, no earpieces or comm units, both bird dæmons, possibly analysts. They recognised Barton but not her; gratifyingly, they didn’t ask, but they did look. One of the birds - a hummingbird of some sort - even flitted up to get a good look at Cassum, who was now perched atop Natasha’s hair.

“Невежливый,” she whispered. Rude.

The staring didn’t stop as they continued on their way to the canteen, and now there were people who clearly did know of her, flinching away or trying to move closer depending on their recklessness.

“Is this exposure therapy for them?” she asked, watching a young agent narrowly avoid walking into a wall.

He shrugged. “Everyone’s gotta get used to it.”

Natasha had crystal clear memories of stepping onto the stage at the Mikhailovsky Theatre as première danseuse, but thought that the audience had been more polite than the employees now using the SHIELD canteen. Those who knew her face and her name were hissing the information to those who didn't; any dæmon with flight darted upwards to take a look at her, and every human she passed craned their neck without pretense.

“Just level four and up?” she said drily as they walked over to join the queue.

Barton sniffed. “Well, you know what they say about the best way to pass information. Tell three people it’s top secret.”

For the first time since arriving in the States, she felt a flare of temper. The staring didn’t bother her - she had been stared at for as long as she could remember - but the implication that SHIELD was so loose with its information was galling.

Barton didn’t seem to notice. “Anyway, they’ll get over it.”

Natasha rather doubted that would happen any time soon.

She let Barton go ahead of her in the queue and picked out exactly what he did: meatloaf with boiled potatoes and roasted carrots, and a chunk of supposedly apple-flavoured cake. Stodgy, boring food, more than serviceable. Barton glanced at her tray but didn’t comment, and led her to a table right in the corner of the room, along the wall from the door. Clear sightlines to the entrance. Not close enough to it to be ambushed, but not far enough away that it would be difficult to sneak out. No doubt that was his assessment as well, and this choice was supposed to be some sort of gesture. He let her sit down first, but rather than sitting opposite her and blocking his own sightlines, he stationed himself perpendicular to her. His dæmon hopped up onto the chair next to him, scanning the room and not bothering to hide it.

Cassum buzzed sharply against her ear, and Natasha saw a young man approaching. He was trying to look confident, walking just a little too slowly, overcompensating - he had probably been dared to approach . Barton’s dæmon’s ears twitched; she had noticed too, which meant Barton certainly had. He was waiting to see how she reacted.

She ignored them all until the boy arrived at her side.

“Hey,” he said. “You’re a new face round here.”

Only then did she look up. She catalogued the slight sheen of sweat at his temples, the way his seagull dæmon was shifting from foot to foot, pathetic. She glared, and watched the colour drain from his face.

“Um, I mean, you’re the Black Widow, right?”

She smirked.

He lifted his hands. “Okay, sure. Whatever, man.”

His gait was much faster during his retreat. Barton was looking at her, evaluating her, but eventually shrugged and went back to his food. They ate in silence after that, and no one else was foolish enough to come close.

Perhaps she should have played him, Natasha thought to herself, started manipulating the people around her from the moment she was released into their company, but it would be too obvious. Barton for one would know immediately what she was doing, and he was doubtless reporting on her. Long term, it was probably better to keep to herself for now.

She looked down at her dinner, and settled in for the long game.

~

The rooms that Clint had swung for him and the Black Widow - he should really call her Romanoff, he thought to himself - were a bit of a joke among the higher level SHIELD agents. Technically, they were there for any high-ranking agent who couldn’t make it home that night, but in reality, this was Coulson’s suite. What was now Romanoff’s room usually served as Coulson’s office - not that he didn’t have a real office several floors up, but if he was using this one, he could at least pretend he had gone home to sleep rather than meticulously filling out paperwork elsewhere in the building. Clint had met Coulson outside these rooms many a time, usually with a teasing remark about hypothetical houseplants somewhere in the city which would surely have perished through neglect. He’d never actually stayed here himself before.

“Welcome to your new home,” he said to Romanoff. “Notable features include a brand new security system which will lock us in at 11pm every evening and open at 5am. Otherwise, it needs my retinal scan to open from the inside.” He ignored the way she pointedly did not examine the door. “Four rooms: living area, two bedrooms, one bathroom. You’re on the left, I’m on the right. There should be some more clothes in the dresser, and toiletries and stuff in the bathroom. Um, both bedrooms open on the bathroom, all interior locks have been taken out. Just so you know.”

Thea brushed against his leg; he was rambling. But Romanoff wasn’t saying anything, and Clint felt like he should be filling the silence somehow.

“If you wanna settle in,” he trailed off.

She nodded slowly, still telegraphing her moves. Clint was kind of heartened by that; it meant she was willing to play along, at least for now.

Romanoff turned her back quite willingly on him as she went into her new room, though her dæmon crawled back over her shoulder to keep an obvious eye out. Clint hesitated, but then sat down on an armchair, deciding to give her a moment.

“Shouldn’t we follow her?” Thea asked quietly. Romanoff could probably hear her, but there was no point fretting about that.

“Well, she can’t escape,” Clint pointed out. “Windows painted shut, fatal drop-”

“She could be setting up - something,” said Thea, but she clearly didn’t believe it herself. Through the open door, they heard drawers opening and closing, and soft murmurs in Russian. Clint spoke decent Russian, but not well enough to decipher whispers heard over distance.

“Maybe,” he said. No use letting Romanoff think he’d be lax in watching her, but Thea fixed him with a look that told him she wasn’t fooled.

Clint ignored her, focusing instead on his new home. He'd only really been in to test the retinal scanner, which was on an isolated system, just in case Romanoff attempted to hack into it when she was in a computer class or something. There was no computer in here, not even a radio. Instead, there were books, and a cheap CD player. Clint was pretty sure that was a bad idea - sound to block conversations from the microphones, an electrical power source which Romanoff could potentially turn into a weapon - but then she was so lethal that it felt pointless to take it away. For god's sake, there was an enormous English dictionary on the shelf which would make a hell of a blunt object.

Clint wondered how long it would take him to get bored enough to start crafting knives out of splinters and paper.

"This is gonna be dull as sin, isn't it?" he mused.

"That or far too interesting," Thea batted back. "But yeah. We're cooped up for now."

"Hmm."

They lapsed into silence, waiting for Romanoff to complete her tour. It was a good few minutes before she emerged - from her bedroom door, though Clint was sure she would have gone into his room as well, to check for the cameras if nothing else. She ignored him for the moment, examining the bookshelf and the collection of CDs. She didn't linger on any of them that Clint could see.

“Is there anything you want?” he asked. “Like, I don’t know, any books missing in particular?”

She ignored the question. “There are three cameras in the bathroom,” she said. “You’re giving up a lot of privacy here.”

So she didn’t expect any for herself; well, that was just realistic of her. “I grew up in a carnival trailer,” he told her. “And, y’know, I can be pretty sure they’ll delete irrelevant footage once we’re out of here, so as long as you don’t attack me while I’m naked-”

She didn’t laugh, but then he wasn’t really expecting her to. Her face remained impassive as she asked, “So, when will I be out of here?”

“Not sure,” Clint said. “They’re probably still working on a timeline. I got a starting schedule for you, though - they’re putting you in with the newbies. I’m shadowing you to your classes, but apparently they’re trusting you to behave once you’re actually in them. I just get to shepherd you around between them.”

“The newbies,” she repeated. Her voice was devoid of all emotion, which probably meant she had strong opinions on the matter. Having gone through basic weapons training when SHIELD first picked him up, Clint could kind of empathise. Should he be empathising? His instincts were saying yeah, that she was a victim if she was anything, but he knew intellectually that she really wasn’t. However she’d started out in life, she’d since become a cold-hearted killer. He couldn’t let himself forget that.

Still, the Black Widow in basic training. Ouch.

“Ah, it’ll fly by,” he lied.

~

It did not fly by. Weeks she had to spend in basic training programmes, being taught SHIELD protocol and procedure, and all the time she was watched. Partly it was her own fault; when she was ushered into a physical training session in week two of her probation, it took her only ten minutes to be removed from the course. In retrospect, she might have achieved the same thing by having Barton speak to his handler, but she still had some pride. She had waited for the inevitable: “Right, I need a volunteer.”

Natasha had smiled and raised her hand. And then she had taken him down in two and a half seconds.

The result of that was Barton being called to take her away. Outwardly, he was serious about the matter, but his dæmon’s nose was twitching in a way that made Natasha think she was concealing laughter, and once the door closed behind them she leapt up at Barton’s elbow once before settling back down.

“It’s funny, then,” Natasha said.

Barton glanced at her, and his face showed a lot less than his dæmon’s behaviour. “Not likely to have major consequences. Does it matter if I think it’s funny?”

She shrugged. “It’s information about you.”

She started in the direction of the rooms they were sharing, but was stopped by the dæmon leaping in front of her. Cassum buzzed in irritation, once again settled atop her head. It was the ultimate passive way of stopping her moving forward, assuming that she wouldn’t harm Barton by touching his dæmon. She moved to step around her, but Barton blocked her, still without touching her.

“Alright, Romanoff, you want information about me. Two choices then. Either we go somewhere which isn’t bugged to hell and play twenty questions, or we go and spar.”

She took a second to evaluate. He was being genuine.

“Terms?” she asked.

For the first time since she’d known him, he grinned. “Hand to hand, no weapons, no making non-weapon things into weapons, no long-term damage, human only.”

She allowed herself a smirk. “Define long-term.”

“A week,” he said. “Although bear in mind that the worse you hurt me, the less likely it is you’ll get a sparring partner any time soon.”

“You took me down in Kiev,” she pointed out.

That made him shut down a little, just as she thought it would. “Doesn’t count,” he said. “You let me.”

She felt a little more certain of him after that response. A sense of justice, empathy. She could use that. “Yes. So. Where are we having our rematch?”

Barton led her to a gym not far from the training room. The door was locked, and it amused her that he jimmied the lock with a lock-picking kit he just happened to have in his pocket. A sense of justice, yes, but he would break the rules if they wouldn’t have consequences.

Cassum lifted out of her hair to evaluate the space, but it was featureless to an extreme, probably designed precisely for hand-to-hand sparring. There was an observation gallery at the top, but it was deserted. From here, the door seemed to be closed. It was still undesirable; Natasha had a healthy respect for snipers.

Barton saw her looking. “Want to move?”

“No.”

She quickly plaited her hair into a single braid; it would be easy for Barton to grab, but it would hurt less than him catching freer sections of hair and it wouldn’t get in her eyes. Barton just took off his jacket and tossed it into the corner of the room. His dæmon hopped out of the way, though only a couple of metres. He’d never been stretched, then.

“Well then,” she said. “Three, two, one.”

~

Even two months after Barton brought Romanoff in, the paperwork was still doing Phil’s head in. The actual mission itself was dealt with, but Barton was hanging in a state of limbo, technically off probation but in reality little more than a prisoner himself, and by God, Romanoff was a Gordian knot when it came to documentation. He had to turn her into a legal citizen of the USA, get her a pardon for all the crimes she’d committed in the past under dozens of different names, fighting the damn reactionary World Security Council every step of the way...

And yet for all of that, the worst part was registering her dæmon’s form, as was standard for immigrants or those requiring passports. Phil had yet to see her, but had been informed by Nick that she was now taking the form of a European hornet.

“ _Vespa crabro_ ,” he told Phil. “Far as anyone’s aware, that’s her settled form.”

Phil raised an eyebrow. “Should I edit her file?”

“Only the public one.”

“Naturally.”

That was the problem right there. He knew Nick. This situation would go one of two ways: either Romanoff would prove herself a traitor and would be taken out by SHIELD, or she would prove her trustworthiness and, what with her skillset, end up being one of SHIELD’s most highly-prized assets. If that was the case, Phil knew that Nick wouldn’t insist on her keeping up the pretense, at least not in private, but that decision wouldn’t be made for years to come, and in the meantime, Romanoff needed documentation.

So the problem persisted, along with Phil’s headache. He stayed later and later in his office, wishing he hadn’t lost the use of the rooms that Barton and Romanoff were now using; at least there Alevrie could drag him to bed. This wasn’t even his job, this should have been passed to someone else, except the Black Widow could only be dealt with by someone with his security clearance, and Phil had rashly promised to make Romanoff his problem in order to protect Barton. He couldn’t regret that decision, but he could sure as hell resent the work that came with it. Alevrie wasn’t even pretending to pay attention, slumped on her seat with her eyes closed, when there was a knock at the door.

Immediately Alevrie sat up, as did Phil. “Come in,” he called.

The young woman who entered was unfamiliar to him. “Sorry to interrupt, sir, but Agent Barton and the - uh, Probationary Agent Romanoff have broken into one of the training gyms on the twelfth floor?”

“Was that a question or a statement?” Phil asked drily.

Her squirrel dæmon chittered from atop her shoulder. She cleared her throat. “A statement, sir.”

“And why are you telling me this?”

“To be honest, sir, it’s because I’m the newest person working in surveillance and no one knew who else to tell.”

Phil chuckled at that, although mainly in despair. “Thank you, Miss…?”

“Malone, sir.”

“Thank you, Miss Malone, I’ll deal with it.”

The door closed and Alevrie scoffed. “Deal with it. How have we ever ‘dealt with’ Barton?”

“Come on,” Phil said. “It’s a good excuse to put off some of this damn paperwork. And we have to meet Romanoff at some point.”

Once he reached the twelfth floor, it was easy enough to work out which gym the pair of them had broken into - the noise was signal enough.

“Not actual fighting,” Alevrie said after a second. “Sparring.”

That was interesting. Already training together? “Don’t these rooms have galleries?”

They headed back up a floor. The gallery door was locked, but unlike Barton, Phil had a skeleton key to the unimportant rooms of the building. Quietly, he let himself in - and immediately ducked as a shoe came flying at his head.

“Woah, Romanoff!” Barton shouted.

“Who are you?” she demanded. “Stand up and show yourself, I know I didn’t hit you.”

Phil resisted the powerful temptation to do so with his hands above his head and surveyed  the scene below. Romanoff had Barton on the floor, several feet back - presumably she had thrown him out of her immediate vicinity in order to deal with the incoming threat. How strong was she?

“I'm Agent Coulson,” he said. He tried to make the clearing of his throat sound like it wasn't a tell for fear. “Would you like your shoe back, Ms Romanoff?”

Apparently this was too much for Barton, who sniggered until his dæmon yelped.

“Your dæmon stung Thea!” he complained, getting to his feet.

“You were mocking me,” Romanoff hissed, not taking her eyes off of Phil.

“And now you’re testing him, am I right?” He didn’t wait for a response but called up to Phil. “She does that, sir. I think it’s a sign of affection.”

Phil’s head was spinning. He went with his customary strategy in such circumstances, and ignored Barton. “I apologise for startling you, Ms Romanoff. I was informed that you and Agent Barton had broken into this gym, the implication being that no one else will willingly deal with Barton.”

“And that’s how he shows affection,” Barton said to Romanoff.

Romanoff’s hackles seemed to be lowering slightly. “How did you intend to deal with us, then?” she asked. Phil tried not to read too much into the choice of pronoun; it might easily have been another test, implying that she’d somehow stolen Barton from him to see how he’d react.

“I hadn’t really decided,” he said honestly. “I thought it was probably a good idea to see what was actually happening  first.”

She took a moment and then offered a sharp nod. “In which case, could you return my shoe.”

It was on the borderline of impoliteness, but Phil let it go for the moment. He picked up the shoe - a SHIELD-issue training plimsoll, of course she had no clothes of her own - and gently threw it down to her where she caught it with perfect grace.

There was a moment of quiet as she put it back on, Phil and Barton both watching her. _Fucked up as a fruitcake_ , Phil thought. Barton’s report on Romanoff. It had been hard enough for Barton when Phil had brought him in, an orphan on the run, but at least with old social skills to fall back on. Romanoff had additional culture shock to deal with, and the knowledge that everyone around her was waiting for her to make a mistake And who on earth would trust a woman who didn’t have a settled dæmon?

It would have been the height of foolishness to become the first who did trust her. Phil would leave that to Barton.

“I take it that you were sparring,” he said.

“Yes sir,” Barton said smartly. “Romanoff was a bit ahead of the curve in basic physical.”

“Understandably so,” Phil nodded. “Would you mind me watching?”

Barton tried to exchange a glance with Romanoff, but she didn’t look at him. “He’s gonna have to evaluate you at some point,” he pointed out.

Still she waited. It wasn’t a hesitation; she clearly wasn’t tempted either way. She was waiting for more information to allow her to make the decision.

“Ms Romanoff, I am not a field agent any more, and I can guarantee you that if I’m actually fighting hand-to-hand in the field then something’s gone very, very wrong. There are cameras recording in this gym, which I’m sure you’re aware of, so I won’t learn anything  about your fighting style that I couldn’t already have taken from the footage. And as Barton said, I will have to evaluate you at some point - I’ve been nominated provisionally as your handler in the event that you do become a fully qualified field agent, and in order to best utilise you-”

“Alright,” she interrupted, and only then did she turn to Barton. “Same terms,” she said.

Barton shook himself a little, jumped up on his toes a couple of times. “Agreed. In three, two-”

Watching them fight was like watching a particularly violent clash between a ballerina and a swing dancer. Every move Romanoff made was precise, meticulous; Barton went more for fluidity and strength. Phil had never been much of a poetic person, but he kept coming up with metaphors for them: digital and analogue, typing and calligraphy, ink and pencil. They were both holding back, he knew, but it was more obvious from Romanoff. Every one of her blows was adjusted in relation to where on the body she landed it; a jab to the back of the knee was forceful, but when her foot struck his throat - his throat! How had he left his throat undefended? - it was barely a tap.

“She’s astounding,” Alevrie muttered.

Phil hummed his agreement. Barton was good, but his real strength was his marksmanship, and Romanoff outmatched him here. Phil had to wonder, though, how much more she would have to give in a real combat situation, and how much less. Could she still be as precise, as perfectionist as this, when her opponent was trying to kill her?

He thought back over the file he’d given Barton two months ago, and thought that she probably could.

Suddenly, he felt Alevrie tense beside him. “Her dæmon,” she said. “Five metres away from her.”

If anyone else had said that to him, he would have asked for proof. Many studies had been conducted on the possible distance between dæmon and human, and although there was some natural variation, it averaged out at two and a half metres. There was no statistically significant correlation between distance and any other factor, but that hadn’t stopped various bigots throughout history using biased studies to suggest that certain groups of people were less human than others. The only people who could move further than three metres from their dæmons were those who had been severed.

And yet there she was, visible now Phil was looking for her, hovering far above the fight and slightly off to the side, away from Phil.

“But Barton said they were whole,” he said to Alevrie. “They ran brain scans-”

“They must have been wrong. She must have tricked them.”

“Tricked Barton, a whole team of psychologists, and Hill,” Phil pointed out, but then he doubted that any psychologist was prepared for the Black Widow, and he didn’t know Hill very well. She was a bit of a rising star, shooting up the ranks with alarming speed thanks to the sort of loyalty and duty that everyone claimed was the ideal, and secretly detested. If she got much further, Phil had a suspicion that Nick would somehow push her into a position which forced her to show some creativity, or put her principles above the rules. In the meantime, he didn’t know if she would be able to spot Romanoff hiding being severed.

A loud thump recaptured his attention, and he looked down to see that Romanoff had finally taken Barton down by wrapping her thighs around his neck, presumably using her momentum to flip him to the floor.

“Concede?” she called, only slightly breathless.

“Conceded,” Barton gasped out. “Sheesh, that’s a move. Teach me to do that?”

She looked at his body shape, and might even have been smirking, Phil couldn’t tell from his position.

“Maybe not,” she said. “You have different advantages to me.”

Thea bounded towards them to sniff over Barton’s body, checking for damage; Romanoff shifted carefully out of her way and looked up for her own dæmon, who dived down to land on her collarbone.

Phil stood up and offered a round of applause. Barton laughed, jumped up to take a theatrical bow. Even Romanoff smiled, though Phil wasn’t sure that he believed it.

“Very impressive,” he said, honestly. “Would you say hand-to-hand fighting is your greatest skill?”

She shook her head. “Infiltration. Espionage, if you want to be poetic about it. I can be anything. Although naturally I’ve lost one major advantage since my defection.” Her dæmon punctuated the point by flying once round her head and settling in her hair.

There was something slightly accusatory in her expression, Phil thought. He decided not to apologise.

"Naturally," he said. "Well, I have paperwork to be doing and you haven't broken any SHIELD equipment as far as I can see. Except, perhaps, Barton. Romanoff, I'll take you out of the physical training course. Barton, lock the door when you're done, will you?"

He had to go and research outliers in human-dæmon distance.

~

Clint watched him go, noticing Alevrie scramble slightly to get off her chair. Something had spooked him. He made a mental note to swing by his office next time Romanoff was safely ensconced in a procedure class.

"So, what did you think of him?" he asked her.

Her face was carefully blank, as it always was. "He's not what I expected."

Clint rolled his eyes. "You are just the queen of non-answers, aren't you."

"You're the prince of spotting them, then," she shot back.

Which itself was a misdirection. He sighed. “Come on, Romanoff. I’m not actually reporting on you. Would it kill you to give me an honest answer once in a while?”

“For all I know, it might!” she snapped.

That might have been honest. She hadn’t beaten him black and blue, she was too controlled for that, but he suddenly felt the aches a lot more. “Why did you even let me take you in?”

She just shook her head.

“Romanoff. You gave an answer to Hill when she asked you that.”

“So why are you asking me again?”

“Cos I’m wondering if you’ve changed your mind. Or if Cassum has, I guess.”

He was aware of Thea’s ears quivering at his side. Not for the first time, he wondered if he should go into full undercover mode around Romanoff. They were probably giving away too much of themselves, but then how the hell was Romanoff ever going to integrate if she didn’t see -

“I don’t know.”

It wasn’t Romanoff who’d spoken. Clint looked up to see that Cassum had left her perch on Romanoff’s collarbone and was hovering between them. He wasn’t really sure how wasps’ eyesight functioned, but he tried to meet her eye all the same.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You going to put us on suicide watch now?” Romanoff spat.

He raised an eyebrow. “You already are. I’m not following you around for the good of my health.”

Her grin was brief, but visceral. “You know that sense of empathy will get you killed.”

“Yeah, I’m aware that if you decided to commit suicide, you would probably do it by killing other people and waiting to get taken out,” he said. “Not sure I’d be the best target, what with your sense of pride, but I’m convenient, I guess.”

“You’re a necessity,” Romanoff counters. “I take you out, just gone midnight probably, once we’re locked in our rooms, so there’s no one to raise the alarm. Then I get out, make for other significant targets.”

“You know our rooms are bugged to high hell,” he said.

“You think I can’t take you out silently, without the cameras seeing anything suspicious?”

“Why are we discussing this?” Thea broke in. “Look, you don’t trust us, we don’t trust you, but we’d like to change that.”

Romanoff sneered. “How long have you got?”

Clint shrugged. “Til someone kills me.”

“You’re ridiculous,” she said, but it wasn’t as violent this time. Clint would take ‘less violent’ as progress.

He checked his watch. “Haven’t you got some boring class to get to?”

“Weapons handling 101.”

He couldn’t help it - he laughed. “So, you gonna get yourself thrown out by turning a gun on the instructor?”

She looked at him, considering. “Depends. Think I can get moved up?”

“Maybe if you actually talk to the instructor,” Clint suggested. “Come on.”

He left her there, feeling like a parent dropping his kid off at kindergarten. He had an inkling that Romanoff wouldn’t appreciate him waving her off and telling her to “play nice with the other kids!” even if, given the afternoon’s events, the sentiment kind of applied.

Having spent a couple of weeks living with the woman, he felt like Fury had picked the wrong form for her dæmon. She wasn’t a wasp, she was a hedgehog, all prickles and wariness, and deceptively sweet-looking. Oddly enough, he didn’t feel like she was a predator, although he wasn’t looking forward to the time when he would inevitably provoke her into fighting back.

He did kinda hope she got over her constant distrust at some point. It was exhausting for him just to coexist with her, letting her ignore all his attempts at friendly overtures, trying not to antagonise her more than necessary. He wasn’t all that worried about her actually attacking or trying to escape, but hell, she surely couldn’t keep on like she was. She slept ridiculously lightly, was always awake before him and didn’t go to sleep until after he’d gone to bed. She ate only what she could see other people eating and only filled her water bottle from coolers she’d seen others use. She’d come with him during the weekend when he did the laundry and watched intently, presumably making sure he was using the same washing powder for both of their clothes.

There was no way she could go on like this. She needed a jail break.

“Let’s go see Coulson,” Thea said as they walked away from the shooting range a few days later.

“Reckon we can get permission for a bit of shore leave?”

“With her? Not a chance,” she said. “We’d have to take a full team of bodyguards, make sure we’re not letting her loose on unsuspecting civilians.”

And sure enough, Coulson began to shake his head before Clint had even finished the question. “Not an option, Barton.”

“Come on, sir,” Clint wheedled. “She’s not a prisoner any more, we can’t treat her like one.”

“We’re treating her like a security risk,” said Coulson. “You’re the one who said she was, and I quote, ‘fucked up as a fruitcake’.” The curse sounded unnatural in his mouth, distasteful.

“She’ll be worse if we don’t give her a break,” Clint argued.

“Let me ask you a different question,” said Coulson. “When you first picked her up, why did you say she was entire?”

“Because she is,” Clint said immediately. “She was. I guess it’s hard to tell now she’s a wasp, but her dæmon’s healthy, they reacted to each other’s pain - trust me, she’s not severed.”

Coulson grimaced. “They were five metres apart in that gym.”

Thea shuffled closer to his ankles on pure instinct, but Clint repressed his shudder. “So she’s not normal, that’s not news. Doesn’t mean she’s severed.”

“It doesn’t mean she’s not, either,” said Coulson.

Alevrie huffed, and Clint inclined his head to her, acknowledging the fruitlessness of the argument.

“Alright, compromise - if I can’t take her out, can we at least stop with the no visitors thing. Her classmates won't talk to her, she won't let them. If even just you came around, just to provide some sort of social conversation.”

“Very flattering, Barton.”

Which should have been Clint’s cue to argue back, except Thea trod deliberately on his shoe, and he paused to notice that there was something about the dryness of Coulson’s tone, some bite that was lacking.

“Are you alright, sir?” he asked.

Coulson sighed. "I'm fine, Barton, thank you for your interest."

But Alevrie laid her head on her paws, and Clint frowned. It wasn't like her to be any less inscrutable than her human.

"Sir?"

"It's not your concern, Barton."

There was a slap in the face if Clint had ever heard one. He chose to ignore it. "You are my concern, sir. If there's something I can help with?"

Coulson lifted a hand to his forehead. "What you can do is make sure the damn Black Widow doesn't put a toe out of line, and you do the same."

"Excuse me?"

"The WSC is less than pleased that we're harbouring an international criminal, I still haven't managed to make her a US citizen, and your security clearance would be down to a level three by now if they hadn't wanted to punish you by making you her jailer."

Thea's ears were pointing straight up and quivering. Alevrie was still slumped.

"I see," said Clint.

"I'm sorry, Barton, I told myself I wouldn't put this on you."

"Well, it is my fault," Clint said.

"Don't tell me you're sorry," Coulson said, huffing out a breath.

But Clint took the moment to really think about it. "I'm not. It was the right thing to do."

Alevrie actually laughed at that, a small, quiet sound. “And that’s why we’re fighting for you,” she said.

Thea moved around the desk, and from the other side of it Clint saw her stretching up towards Alevrie’s seat, stopping just short of pressing their paws together. Alevrie hesitated, but completed the gesture.

Coulson actually shuddered. Clint stared.

"Get out of here, Barton."

Probably best not to push his luck. Thea darted back to join him, and they made for the door, but just before they reached it, Coulson spoke again.

“I’ll see what I can do about getting her some company,” he said.

Clint smiled as he left.

~

Natasha's schedule was roughly the same each day, with only slight variations in her classes, although they had in common that they were all unutterably boring. Nothing was new to her besides the specificities of SHIELD. They could teach her nothing about infiltration or fighting. In her more morbid moments, she thought that perhaps the only thing they were effectively instructing her in was how to fight SHIELD. Quite apart from their procedures, she was getting a perfect insight into their personnel; she might have been a pariah among the junior agents she was training with, but she still picked up gossip about their seniors, and she knew how to sort the truth from the rumour.

Ever since that first sparring match with Barton, physical training had been replaced by repeat sessions with him. The sessions almost always ended in her teaching Barton something, which was a new experience for Natasha. She'd never really taught anyone before. It went against all her instincts, and while she tried to reassure herself that Barton would never beat her in hand-to-hand fighting, she knew that, were she injured enough beforehand, anyone half-decent could have a chance. No matter how good she was, she wasn't invincible and she shouldn't be giving Barton anything he could use against her. But she owed him, and if she was going to stay here she would need an ally of some sort. Helping Barton, it was just a sensible move to make him trust her.

It was no use. She could argue it either way and be sure of convincing anyone but herself of her motives.

Then one day, someone new was waiting in their training gym.

"Agent May! Haven't seen you in a while," Barton said casually.

Natasha knew why that would be, even if the precise details were unavailable to her. Bahrain was whispered around the training rooms like it was the name of a circle of hell from which May had miraculously saved over a dozen hostages, one woman against scores of men, plus one superhuman. She had come back changed, by all accounts, and there were many accounts. The details of the story changed between every telling, but anyone who had known Agent May before Bahrain would say that she was a completely different woman now. Even her dæmon had changed form, now a massive, pure black thoroughbred stallion.

“It’s the Cavalry,” the juniors whispered when they saw her.

Looking at the dæmon now, Natasha had a different opinion. May was clearly strong, but brittle, too, and thoroughly tamed. Apparently she’d had a Tibetan fox for a dæmon, before. Natasha had only known one other person who had undergone trauma deep-reaching enough that it changed the entire essence of who they were, and she had killed her for her weakness.

Barton's dæmon had moved forward to greet May's in the sort of instinctive move Natasha had seen a thousand times between friends, but the horse only barely lowered his head, and ultimately the jackrabbit had to skip back again, disappointed.

"Barton," May said shortly. "Romanoff."

Natasha nodded.

"Coulson said you could do with a better sparring partner," said May, and Natasha sharpened her gaze, feeling Cassum twitch from within her hair. This was a test, and she knew how to handle people who tested her.

She inclined her head. "Agent Barton outstrips me in other departments, but not in hand-to-hand."

May nodded, satisfied for now with that response. "Well then. No dæmon contact, no outside help, no weapons. Acceptable?"

Natasha nodded in turn, but Barton cleared his throat. "Uh, damage?"

Natasha kept her eye on May, who in turn kept her gaze on Natasha. When it became clear that neither of them was going to take the opportunity to declare an additional term, Barton's dæmon stepped out in between them.

"I'm not standing by while you two destroy each other," he warned. "Same terms as with me - no damage lasting longer than a week."

A shame. May was either more self-destructive than her superiors knew or completely sure that she could take Natasha out. Natasha would have liked to see that for herself.

"Agreed," she said.

"Agreed," May repeated.

The jackrabbit stepped back and joined Barton right at the edge of the room. "In three, two-"

May struck first. Her dæmon reared, aiming to throw Natasha off, but she ignored him easily, focusing instead on the small whirlwind that was Agent May. It only took Natasha a few seconds to gauge her: strong, fast and, above all, highly disciplined. Clearly adept in multiple martial arts, had almost certainly been trained outside SHIELD. The key to beating her then -

In an unpredictable blast of energy, Natasha went on the dirtiest attack she could muster: nails to eyes, foot to bladder, elbow to neck -

And yet only one landed. Even then, the blow to May's neck was glancing, quickly recovered from as May moved back and down to target Natasha's knees and simultaneously remove access to Natasha's own targets on May's body.

She was good.

No time to think about that, though, because May was still attacking, and so was Natasha, and she felt her body and her mind stretched in a way they hadn't been since she arrived. How to break her, how to break her -

Natasha turned tail and ran for the edge of the room, neatly skipping the leg that May threw out to trip her. She flung herself up the wall and used her momentum to flip backwards - belatedly, she hoped May was good at going down, but she was already landing. There were two loud cracks as May's knees hit the floor, and Natasha used a grip on May's neck to land directly on top of her, feet on May's knees, elbows over her hands - May bucked but she was underestimating Natasha's strength and she failed to break the hold.

"Нет!"

"Stop!"

Cassum and Barton shouted at the same time, and Natasha froze, suddenly aware of the shadow above her. May's dæmon had bolted forwards when May went down, and now he was poised with a foreleg hovering directly over Natasha's neck, ready to stamp. That move would slam May's head into the ground too, but in that moment Natasha had no doubt that he would go through with it.

"Concede," she growled at May.

"Back off!" Barton's dæmon cried. "Get off her!"

"Shut up," Cassum hissed. Natasha wasn't sure where she was, even. She moved her mouth closer to May's ear. "Concede," she said again.

No one moved for one long moment, and then the tension melted from May's body. "Conceded," she agreed.

The horse skittered back and Natasha shifted off May. She didn't offer a hand up, and didn't turn her back on woman or dæmon, backing instead towards the wall, opposite Barton. Cassum dived down and landed on Natasha's shoulder.

May's dæmon bent down, kneeling to let May lean on his shoulder to stand.

"What the fuck, May?" said Barton.

"I didn't trust her not to snap my neck," May said evenly.

"But you weren't just going to kill her, your dæmon was going to kill her! That's-"

"How do you think she got out in Bahrain?" Natasha asked quietly. "One woman against dozens of men, and one enhanced woman. You took every advantage you had, and even the most seasoned fighter won't expect you to break the taboo."

"Shut up," said May, face like a stone. Natasha pressed on.

"You know that's the worst thing that people say about me," she continued. "Not that I killed children or old men or innocents. It's that I killed dæmons, that my dæmon attacked humans. The worst violation of the great taboo."

"Romanoff, stop," said Barton.

She didn't want to. She didn't want to show herself to be tame like that. She didn't want to give this woman an inch; if Natasha deserved to be reviled then so did Melinda May. But May was a high-ranking agent, and this wasn't the way to get on SHIELD's good side, she knew that.

"Yes, sir," she said.

"Same time in two weeks," said May.

Her dæmon’s hooves clacked rhythmically on the floor, marking out a smooth, swaying beat as they left, and though he had to duck to pass through the door, May’s spine remained perfectly straight.

As soon as she had gone, Barton rounded on Natasha. "Look Romanoff, I know she had no right to do that, but there was no need to say all that."

Natasha didn't respond.

"Why did you do that?" Barton asked. "Were you shaken, lashing out, did you just need to prove that she's no better than you - what?"

She stayed quiet.

"What did you want from her?" he pressed. "What do you want from me?"

She closed her eyes.

"Natasha."

"I don't know," she said. "What do you want from me?"

There was a pause, and then Barton asked, "Natasha, can I touch you?"

She was in no position to refuse. She nodded, and felt his hand rest gently on her shoulder. She kept her eyes closed tight as it slid slowly round her back, until he was holding her in his arms.

"I am aware that I'm vile," she said quietly. "I've been aware of that for years."

He drew back and she opened her eyes. He was still close in front of her, but no longer touching. "I guess that's what I want from you," he said. "I want you to keep choosing to live a life that isn't vile."

"Like May did?" Natasha asked.

"Like I did," he corrected. "I kill people for a living, just like I used to before SHIELD, but now I know who I'm shooting, why I'm doing it. I can even refuse a job if I don't agree with it. That's what I want for you."

"Killing for a living," she said.

"Choosing when not to.”


	2. Chapter 2

That seemed to be sort of a breaking point for Romanoff - for Natasha. She'd never actually given Clint permission to use her first name, but she never told him not to either, so he kept it up, and next time she called him Barton, he said, "You know, you can call me Clint."

She scowled and persisted in calling him Barton for the next three days, but eventually she gave up the charade. She stopped being quite so meticulous, occasionally leaving her bed unmade, and she started - well, there was no other word for it - she started teasing Clint. She showed off her pickpocketing skills whenever he gave her the slightest opportunity, tripped him continuously during training, and Cassum took to hovering around Thea's ears until she batted her away. It was still a test, Clint knew that, but this wasn't part of working out whether or not to trust Clint. This was working out a relationship between them.

He didn't know exactly how she was doing in her classes, but she hadn't been kicked out of any others, so he guessed she was playing the model student. At the end of two months, she was authorised to go between her classes without Clint shadowing her, just as Clint was finally taken fully off probation and allowed to start planning missions again, even if he couldn't actually go anywhere.

It was about this time that Maria Hill caught him after a session of analysing Eastern European drug cartels.

"Barton!"

"Agent Hill," he said respectfully. Her lurid yellow frog dæmon was on the floor, hopping forwards to greet Thea, although stopping a good few inches shy of her.

"Coulson asked me to talk to you about socialising with Romanoff," she said.

It was clear from her tone what she thought of that idea. Clint shook his head straight off. "If you're that disgusted with her-"

"Sorry," she said.

That surprised him. Hill didn't seem the sort to admit a mistake. "Point stands. I'm trying to help her integrate and that's not gonna happen if everyone she knows treats her like that."

"I know," said Hill. "And I agree it's important for us to integrate her. At the same time, the reason Coulson came to me is that I'm one of the only people with the clearance to know everything about her past. I spent weeks interrogating her. Acting like I'm alright with what she's done would be dishonest."

For a second, he tried to think if he'd ever seen Hill and May interact, and couldn't come up with anything. Perhaps Hill didn't know the truth about Bahrain, anyway. He certainly hadn't, before Natasha had blurted it out. "That's fair, but you gotta remember that she defected, and so far since then the worst thing she's done is tell the truth. And throw a shoe at Coulson's head. He tell you about that?"

"He did, actually," she said, and there was the flicker of a smile there, which probably told him more about how Coulson had told the story than how Hill had interpreted it.

"So. Come sit with us in the canteen for dinner, and then maybe you could come back to our rooms. See what Natasha thinks."

"She's Natasha now?" Hill asked.

"See you at dinner," Clint said.

Her dæmon made a slight noise in his throat but Hill nodded. Clint watched her go, her dæmon lolloping after her. A slow-moving hedgehog dæmon put on a burst of speed to skitter out of his way, and Hill paused to scoop him up in her hands.

Clint met Natasha after a computer class at six that afternoon. She didn't actually smile upon seeing him, but she met his gaze and came straight over to him, which was about as friendly as she got.

"Actually learn anything today?" he asked.

"Maybe," she answered.

"Ha. So, you know Maria Hill, right?"

"Not half as well as she knows me," Natasha said drily.

"Right, yeah. Well, she wants to meet up for dinner."

Natasha raised an eyebrow. "A totally unprovoked and spontaneous decision, I'm sure."

"Okay, so it was originally my idea," Clint admitted. "Can't do any harm though, right?"

"Unless she decides I'm still dangerous to SHIELD and has me thrown back in a cell," Natasha pointed out.

He looked at her, but he couldn't tell if she was genuinely worried about it. Cassum was hidden in her hair, and a wasp was hardly the easiest animal to read anyway.

“I’ll bail you out,” he joked.

“You and whose bank account?” she shot back, but he thought maybe the set of her shoulders was a little looser now.

“So, dinner with your ex-interrogator?” he prodded.

“You know she nearly vomited at two separate points during the time she was interviewing me?” Natasha said casually.

“I do now,” he said. “Other things I know include that you are really good at not answering questions.”

“Thank you,” she said.

He waited, and eventually she sighed.

“Fine,” she said. “Dinner with Maria Hill. I need to shower and change first.”

It was one of the first preferences she had actually expressed - she preferred to use the shower in bathroom she shared with Clint rather than the communal ones by the gyms. Clint nodded. "Sure, let’s go."

People still turned to look at the pair of them as they walked through the corridors, though less than when Natasha had first been let out of her confinement. It was all becoming sort of normal, which was sad in its own way. Clint was really starting to itch at the lack of activity. He hadn’t even left the Triskelion since becoming Natasha’s bodyguard.

Still, there was a comforting sort of domesticity to the way that Natasha absently left her jacket on the sofa in the common area between their bedrooms.

“Why Maria Hill?” she called, heading into her bedroom to pick up fresh clothes.

“Coulson’s idea,” Clint replied, settling onto the sofa. He picked at a loose thread that was unraveling on one of the cushions. “I guess because you don’t have to pretend with her.”

“Or because she won’t be taken in,” Natasha called back. “Is that what Coulson’s afraid of?”

“What?”

“Why haven’t I seen him? I’ve met him once, that time in the gym. It’s a reasonable hypothesis that he’s afraid of me. Hold on, I’m getting in the shower.”

Clint couldn’t really think of any empirical evidence to prove her wrong, but he didn’t really think that was it. Coulson certainly didn't trust her, but then Clint wasn't even sure he did yet. If she was given a good enough reason to turn on him, she would probably do it, he thought. That wasn't enough to explain Coulson's distance safe in the confines of the Triskelion. Natasha had a point. When Clint had come in, he'd seen Coulson far more often than any newbie should have seen a senior agent. He did have something against Natasha, something more than the enormous amounts of paperwork she was generating.

The shower shut off after a couple of minutes. Clint gave it a couple more before knocking on Natasha's door.

"Yep," she said, and he smiled at the slang as he went in.

She only had on sweatpants and a sports bra, and her hair was still wet, but she was entirely unconcerned, so he followed her lead and flumped onto her bed, Thea hopping up with him. "Not sure what's up with Coulson, to be honest."

"You don't think he's scared then." She scrubbed her hair with a towel.

"There's not that much that scares him," Clint shrugged. "Sorry, I don't think you make the grade, not on your own."

"And in conjunction with you?"

Clint frowned. "What, you reckon he thinks you're convincing me to destroy SHIELD from the inside or something?"

"Or something," she said. "Pass me that shirt."

He threw it at her head, just because he could, but she nabbed it out of the air in a graceful swipe as Cassum dove out of the way.

"Things are changing," said Natasha.

"They usually do," said Clint.

She made a little sibilant 'psh' sound. "Come on. Dinner awaits."

~

Maria didn’t often eat in the main cafeteria if she could help it. She preferred her own cooking, and had done since college and the realisation that cooking for herself was both healthier and cheaper. Still, she put in overtime often enough that the mess hall was sometimes just the most convenient option, and she was well aware that the table in the corner of the room was reserved nowadays for Hawkeye and the Black Widow. No one else had eaten there since Romanoff’s arrival. Today, Romanoff had her back to the room with Barton watching the door. He nodded to Maria when she came in, which she took to mean that she was in fact being invited to eat with them.

“Maybe we should pick up plastic cutlery,” Kathiko muttered from atop her shoulder.

“I doubt that would stop her killing me,” Maria pointed out.

He croaked in dry laughter.

Maria picked up a dinner deliberately composed of the default option for each component, betraying no preferences. She wasn’t sure what the Black Widow would do with the knowledge that she preferred blueberries to raspberries in fruit salad, but Maria had got as far as she had by collecting as much information as possible and then being very, very cautious with it. She saw no reason to change.

“Hey, Hill,” said Barton when she slid into a seat next to him, across from Romanoff. “Welcome to the cool kids’ table.”

Maria glanced at Romanoff, who looked perfectly blank, just as she had during those interminable interrogation sessions. “Very cool,” she said.

“Nice to see you,” Maria said pleasantly.

“Liar,” Romanoff replied in the same tone of voice.

“All smalltalk is lies, get used to it,” Barton said.

He was trying too hard, and there was no way Romanoff didn’t recognize it. Maria wondered what she thought about his attempts to socialise her like a child or a particularly recalcitrant pet, but her face was as unreadable as ever.

"So what do you do when you're not interrogating Barton's strays?" she asked, toying with her food rather than eating it.

Was that supposed to indicate some sort of possessiveness? An alliance? Maria didn’t know. "I’m normally a missions coordinator," she said. "I oversee the possible intersection between different missions, stop Barton accidentally blundering into a delicate operation somewhere he shouldn't be."

"What is this, pick on Clint day?" Barton protested.

Maria smirked, as she was clearly being cued to do. Romanoff glared at Barton, although Maria wasn't sure if it was at the bad manipulation or at the bad joke. Possibly both.

“So, you only ended up talking to me because your security clearance is so high,” Romanoff stated.

“I do have the appropriate training,” Maria pointed out. “But yes, that’s why I got that particular joy.”

Kathiko had crept down her arm to sit on the table; now he twitched in a sign that she had maybe been a little too free with the sarcasm there.

They didn't speak for a moment, and Maria took the opportunity to actually eat some of her dinner. She already sort of regretted not opting out of the beef stew, but what was done was done. Romanoff had gone for the marinated salmon, she saw - in fact, she had gone for exactly the same things as Barton, or maybe vice versa.

“So, lovely weather we’ve been having,” Barton said eventually.

Romanoff raised an eyebrow at him. “Neither of us have been outside for at least a month.”

“Let me introduce you to this exotic American concept. It’s called a window.”

“I think you’ll be getting out soon enough,” Maria said to Barton. “They’re starting to feel the lack of a proper sharpshooter. You heard about Coulter’s screw-up last week?”

“Be fair to the girl, I saw the specs, that was an almost impossible shot she was supposed to make.” When Maria and Romanoff stayed silent, he sighed. “Okay, I would’ve made it. But still.”

“Do I get a new jailer then?” Romanoff asked.

“Harsh,” Barton muttered.

“Not my department,” Maria shrugged.

Romanoff didn’t react to that at all. Too late, Maria remembered that she had been trained - owned? - by a Department X, but then did Romanoff even have triggers? Surely they’d been trained or beaten out of her. She cast about for a new topic of conversation, until her eyes lit upon Romanoff’s dæmon, sitting in the hollow above her collarbone.

“Do you miss having your dæmon as… something else?” Maria asked.

That did get a reaction. Barton tensed, and Romanoff fixed her with a cool stare. “Don’t you wish yours wasn’t poisonous?”

Barton looked uncomfortable. “Natasha…”

“No, that’s fair, I asked first,” said Maria. She looked down at her Kathiko; he hopped from the table onto her hand. “I was a bit resentful as a teenager. You know the Latin name for the species is _terribilis_? Most people don’t like their dæmons to get too close, in case he poisons them.”

Kathiko let out a little croak. She ran a finger down his spine.

“I take it you’re immune,” Barton said.

Maria shook her head. “Dart frogs get their toxicity from their food. Dæmons don’t eat. He’s about as poisonous as I am.”

Barton actually laughed at that. Maria ignored him. “So, I showed you mine. How did you feel about Fury giving you a hornet dæmon?”

“A hornet?” Barton interrupted. “You know, I’ve gone this entire time thinking she was a wasp?”

“Specifically a European hornet,” Romanoff said. “A pest accidentally brought to North America. The director’s keen on symbolism, I gathered.” The hornet buzzed around Romanoff’s head, perhaps showing off, before settling in her hair. Romanoff met Maria’s eye. “I don’t see that there’s much point in missing any other form.”

“I suppose not,” said Maria.

Romanoff settled back. “You want to understand me.”

It was almost a non sequitur, but it was more the bluntness of the statement which gave Maria pause. “I want to understand your motivations,” she said. “You don’t like that.”

“This should be a drinking game,” Barton grumbled. “Make a claim about the other person, drink if you’re wrong.”

“I’m Russian,” Romanoff reminded him. “Or I was.”

“See, that’s what I want to understand,” Maria said. “The whole time I was talking to you, you never said anything about _why_ you’d done anything, you never gave any indication of your loyalties, past or present.”

Romanoff regarded her with a look of mild interest. “I don’t really think I have any.”

“Not even to Barton?” Maria pressed. “The guy saved your life, at great cost to his own career, he’s stuck up for you every step of the way-”

“Woah,” said Barton. “Not interested in people feeling indebted to me. Dial it down, Hill.”

“No, she’s right,” Romanoff said, to Maria’s surprise. “I do owe you. Debts are how the world works. They’re how people manipulate each other.”

Maria had listened to Romanoff speak for weeks on end, about facts and historical events and pieces of data like names and dates and locations, and yet somehow she felt like that was the only thing she trusted that Romanoff knew for certain. That was how she viewed the world: debt and manipulation. That was how to keep Romanoff: keep her in debt to SHIELD for as long as possible, until perhaps one day she might actually understand loyalty.

~

By the time that Barton was asked to go back on duty, Phil was feeling more worn down than he had in many years, maybe even since coming off active duty. The more he heard about Barton and Romanoff, the more he worried. She seemed to have her claws deeply into him from what May and Hill had told him, and maybe it was just a friendship, but maybe it was something more sinister. It unnerved him that Romanoff was behaving like a model probationary agent, a model student, when all of them knew exactly what atrocities she had committed only months ago. She was unnatural in behaviour as well as in her dæmon.

He kept an eye firmly on her as she and Barton came into his office.

"Barton, Romanoff."

"Sir," they said in unison.

Alevrie's fur stood up along her spine.

"Barton, you're going back on active duty as of Monday. I'm sure you'll be happy to hear that."

Thea's ears twitched happily, but Barton threw a glance at Romanoff, who hadn't reacted at all. "Yeah, sure. So, what's happening with Romanoff?"

"She'll be moving into the barracks with the other juniors," said Phil. "Congratulations, Junior Agent Romanoff."

Romanoff nodded serenely. "Thank you, sir."

"You no longer have a guard, but we're still restricting your access," Phil continued. "You're confined to the building for now."

"Understood," she said.

"Aw, come on, sir," said Barton, but Phil ignored him.

"You'll be studying and monitoring other agents' missions for the next four weeks, at which point this will be reevaluated."

For the first time, she smiled. "Thank you, sir." Her dæmon had crawled out of her hair to sit on her shoulder.

"The other thing which needs to be dealt with is your salary," Phil said. "As of yet, I haven't managed to set up any formal documentation for you, so either you can wait until you're able to legally hold a bank account and we hold your salary until then, or we can pay it into an account in someone else's name."

"You can't just pay her cash?" Barton asked.

"SHIELD's regulations don't allow for it," Phil countered easily.

Romanoff looked evenly at Phil. "I would be happy for Agent Barton to be a custodian of my salary for now."

Barton blanched. Well, at least it was a shock to him as well, Phil thought. He schooled his expression. "Very well, if you agree, Barton?"

"Wait, hold up a second," he said. "Are you sure, Natasha?"

"Perfectly," she said.

Phil didn't believe it for a second, and neither did Barton by the looks of it. "Tasha-"

"I'm sure," she said again. Then she smirked. "I promise I won't use it as an excuse to break into your own accounts."

That settled him; he laughed. "Okay, fine, sure." He turned back to Phil. "I'll start up a new current account and get you the details."

"Thank you," said Phil.

"And hey, you get your on-site rooms back," Barton said. "I'll tidy up before I leave."

"I'll believe it when I see it," Phil batted back.

Romanoff's eyes were flicking quickly between the two of them. "I didn't know they were your rooms," she said, sounding almost curious.

"Unofficially, yes," he said. "Apparently I spent too many nights working overnight."

She clearly didn't know how to respond to that. If Barton had said it, it would have garnered a sarcastic comeback, but from Phil it was a different matter. Phil was becoming more and more convinced that she was playing Barton somehow, but to what end?

On Saturday evening, Phil came to collect Barton from his old single room in the specialists' barracks and accompany him to a last-minute debrief before his departure. Romanoff was supposed to have moved into her new rooms by now, but Phil was utterly unsurprised to find her in Barton's room, perched on his bed, watching him pack a rucksack.

"You allowed to tell me when you'll be back?" she asked.

"You never know with Agent Barton," Phil cut in.

Thea's tail twitched playfully, but Alevrie had her eyes firmly on Romanoff. Her dæmon was presumably hidden in her hair again. It made Phil feel uneasy, that she was out of sight.

"Should be straightforward, though," Barton said. "Guess they didn't want to tax me on my first go out in months."

"You did fail pretty spectacularly the last time we sent you on a difficult mission," Phil pointed out.

Romanoff whipped her head around to look at him, and Phil raised his hands to indicate that it was a joke. But if that was how she responded to a perceived threat... He had to get her motives out into the open as soon as possible.

"Yeah, well, this time it's just get in, shoot the bastard, get out. Kinda hard to muck that one up," Barton was saying.

"As you say," Phil said drily. "Junior Agent Romanoff, I'm sure I'll see you around. Barton, let's go."

~

Straightforward. Get in, shoot the bastard, get out. Natasha kept those words in her mind through Sunday and into Monday, though the necessity of it irritated her. She didn't like that she was even thinking about this - she shouldn't be worrying about Clint except that without him she was entirely without allies. She was trying to ingratiate herself with her instructors, except normally when she was infiltrating a setting she didn't have to fight against her entire reputation. In the meantime, she just had to keep being as good a junior agent as she could.

It was with this in mind that she was listening attentively to the procedural instructor as he explained how she and two of her supposed peers would be observing a mission taking place on a different continent.

“You’ll be listening in on the comms, but without microphones,” he said. “Don’t say or do anything to distract the handler.”

“Whose mission is it, sir?” asked one of the junior agents. Eve Silverton, cat dæmon, impetuous, curious.

“Agent Coulson, handling Hawkeye.”

Now that did catch Natasha’s attention. Silverton and the other one, Lee Bhojani (snake dæmon, cold, cautious) both glanced at her. Carefully, she didn’t react.

“This is an assassination mission, in Budapest, Hungary,” the instructor continued (Mike Bolton, raven dæmon, slow, stubborn) and he was deliberately not focusing on Natasha. “The target is a scientist working for an up-and-coming drugs trafficker; he’s in the process of adapting cocaine to induce some sort of genetic mutation. You have half an hour to read through the files, after which point I will take them back. You will then proceed to the control centre, room 7C.”

They nodded their understanding, and Bolton pushed the folder over to them. Natasha stood up to better read over Silverton’s shoulder.

The first thing she noticed was how sanitary the whole thing was. The language used was bland, inoffensive: Hawkeye deployed to neutralise threat, no extraction planned. Almost nothing to suggest that Clint had been sent out to murder, terminate, kill. It was a dishonest way of putting it, to Natasha’s mind.

And then Silverton turned the page.

“You have your information wrong,” Natasha said immediately. “Balázs Kovács is almost definitely a false name, it’s like John Smith in English. And this drugs-trafficking business he’s working for - it can’t be operating primarily north-west of Budapest, because that’s Imrich Zupan’s territory - Slovak, he operates across the border. Where did you get this information?”

“Where did you get yours?” Bolton demanded.

“I did a job for Zupan,” she answered easily. “Three weeks before Barton brought me in.”

“You’ve been here for four months,” Bolton countered. “That’s more than long enough for the situation to have changed. This information is fresh-”

“-and most likely a plant,” Natasha argued. “Zupan-”

“This is not your concern, Agent Romanoff-”

“This is certainly my concern - you’ll want to know what job I did for them before you send Barton right into the middle of-”

“He’s one of our best agents, he can handle himself.”

“I could have killed him a thousand times over by now,” she hissed. “He’s not infallible.”

A knock on the door interrupted them, and Maria Hill came in without waiting to be called. “Timetable’s moved up. Barton’s in place and ready to take the shot, if you want the juniors to actually hear anything at all.”

“I need to speak to Coulson,” said Natasha.

“You’ll do no such thing,” said Bolton. “Barton is working on fresh information from several sources. Even if you were right, it’s too late to pull him out - the best thing you can do is let Agent Coulson do his job, do you understand me, Romanoff?”

“If he’s captured-”

“-then I will start looking very closely into the possibility of you having infiltrated SHIELD and set this situation up right from the beginning, are we clear?”

The raven dæmon spread her wings in a show of intimidation, but the words were enough. Natasha nodded sharply and turned to follow Hill out of the room. Cassum burrowed into her hair, lying against her scalp to hide her reaction - Natasha could feel her trembling. Like a pig to the slaughter, she trotted dutifully out with Silverton and Bhojani. Bolton strode past them, no doubt intending to warn Coulson of her treachery.

The control room was just like any other room in the building, as far as Natasha could see. Colson stood in front of a large white screen, upon which was projected four smaller screens, presumably corresponding to the computers operated by the four analysts and technicians sitting behind him. Everyone had their own headset on, presumably so if one audio feed was cut, there would still be others available. Even Coulson’s dæmon had headphones on.

Hill gestured the three of them to the back of the room, and handed them their earpieces. “Channel six,” she told them.

Bolton was speaking quietly to Coulson, who nodded his approval at something. It soon became obvious what had been decided: Bolton spoke quickly to Hill and then left, but was replaced in under a minute by two armed agents, who kept their eyes firmly on Natasha.

She pressed down on her emotions and turned her earpiece to channel six.

“No sign of Kovács yet,” Barton said over the radio. “Should be appearing any minute though.”

“Keep an eye out for yourself,” Coulson said.

“Sir?”

Coulson didn’t look back. “There is a possibility that this is a set up.”

“Copy that.” There was a brief pause. “What’s the source of the info?”

“Romanoff,” said Coulson shortly.

A sniff. “Told you we should have got her in on East European planning.”

“Keep your focus, Hawkeye,” said Coulson.

“Sir.”

Silence. Natasha didn’t know if Clint was aware that she was listening in, if he had been told about that before she and the other juniors had come in. The tension in the room was palpable, and then one corner of Coulson’s screen lit up red, the image of Kovács overlaid with the words FALSE IDENTITY.

Cassum had crept down through her hair down to the top of her ear, trying to hear, and now she buzzed involuntarily. Natasha moved her head slightly in warning.

“Hawkeye, Kovács is a false identity, repeat, the target is using a false-”

“Someone’s here,” Clint interrupted, voice low and firm.

“Stay out of sight, defend yourself if necessary,” Coulson ordered.

Clint’s comm wasn’t sensitive enough to pick out the sounds that had alerted him to the newcomer’s approach. Natasha still strained to hear, knowing it was useless. Cassum shifted on top of her ear.

The two junior agents flinched at the sudden gunfire. Silverton put a hand to her ear in pain, and her cat dæmon let out a hiss.

“Hawkeye, report,” Coulson said firmly.

Clint’s voice was breathless. “Two assailants, armed, they must have known I was here-”

Another burst of gunfire, louder - Clint returning fire? But then a fierce growl, and shouting in some Slavic language, a door slamming open? Voices, more than two. Natasha felt horribly out of control, wanted eyes on Clint, wanted to be there, wanted to know that he was protecting -

Another growl, and an animal screaming.

“Thea,” Clint gasped.

A wolf or wolf-like dæmon must have her in their jaws, Natasha thought, and then there was a heavily accented voice, speaking English.

“So. You are the one who took the Black Widow.”

Coulson turned away from his screen and looked straight at her.

“You’re damn right I am,” said Clint, but it was all bravado - she could hear his pain. Thea was whimpering loudly enough to be heard through the comms. “You might wanna put my dæmon down, else I’ll shoot yours.”

The analysts in the room gasped, and Silverton actually swayed.

“Yes, that was her nasty trick,” the other voice hissed.

The next sound was Clint - a gasp - then a short shriek from Thea - then Clint’s voice again.

“There are teams got my back,” he said. “You don’t wanna hurt me, that’ll go badly for you.”

A lie. No extraction planned.

A single gunshot - not Clint’s - he grunted in pain.

“I think not,” said the other voice. Then he switched back into Slovak, Natasha could hear that now, almost definitely Zupan’s men, and she knew enough Czech to tell that he was ordering his men to knock Clint out, to take him away.

And then Clint said, “Sorry sir, sorry Tash. Agent down.”

Thea screamed once more, a horrible, thin, high-pitched sound foregrounded against frantic typing and Coulson’s commands.

“Parry, get an extraction team to him _now_.”

“Hawkeye never has an extraction plan-” Parry protested.

“So make one. Hill, get Romanoff back to her room, lock her in, and then I want you researching every backdoor into this organisation, every possible source of blackmail, you understand?”

“Sir,” Hill confirmed. “Romanoff-”

But Natasha was stalking towards Coulson. “I can get him out.”

“No,” he snapped.

“I know this organisation, I’ve worked for them before, they probably want me - let me go, and I can bring him home.”

“Hill!”

And then there were handcuffs snapping around her wrists, trapping them behind her back. It took every ounce of her self-control not to fight back, not to get out of them, but she had to make him see -

The earpiece was ripped out of her ear, and Thea’s screams abruptly disappeared. It was enough to make her lose focus for an instant, and then she was being hauled towards the door by three pairs of hands, Hill, the guards. Cassum was buzzing angrily around her ear, but they weren’t fighting back, they couldn’t jeapordise their status or they’d never be able to help Barton.

“They have a guillotine, Coulson!” she shouted.

Everything stopped.

Natasha held herself perfectly still. "It was the last job I did before I - before Barton brought me in."

Coulson fixed her with an icy stare. "The only functional guillotine is in the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg."

"Until I stole it," Natasha said. "They're guarding a replica."

The only person still moving, still talking was Parry, frantically typing and speaking over comms to half a dozen people at once. Silverton looked like she might vomit; her cat dæmon had fled into her arms. Talk of intercision did that to people.

"Let me go," Natasha pleaded. "I can-"

But that broke the spell. Coulson turned away. "Get her out of here, Hill."

"Sir."

"No! Sir - Agent Coulson-"

But he was ignoring her now, completely focused on whatever it was he was attempting to get Barton out of danger, and then the door was closed in front of her eyes, and she slumped.

“What can we do, what can we do?” Cassum hissed. “We can’t leave them, we can’t let that happen.”

But Natasha couldn’t see a way out, at least not yet. She could break out of the handcuffs, out of the room, out of SHIELD if she tried just a little, but she would still have to fly to Europe and she just didn’t have the papers or the contacts to do that quickly any more.

“Okay, I can handle it from here,” said Hill. “You two, get to the jets, make yourselves useful.”

“Ma’am,” said one of them - dog dæmon, young man, easily biddable, but presumably senior to the other one because she followed his lead and left at a brisk jog.

And then Hill stepped in front of her.

“Can you get him back?”

“If I get into the area, I can definitely get to him,” she said honestly. “I would have a very good chance of getting him out, better if he’s able to move unaided.”

Hill nodded. “Next question: would you bring him back?”

Natasha looked her straight in the eye. “I owe him my life. Yes. I would bring him back.”

Hill took five seconds to consider. “If I know Coulson, he’ll be sending people he trusts, people based here. Stow on the jet. You’re on your own.”

Natasha handed the cuffs back to her, and then she ran.

~

Of course they would have a guillotine. Of fucking course.

Thea was inside his shirt, pressed close to his heart. No need to make it easy for them to take her.

Clint wasn’t sure how long he’d been out. He was either underground or in an interior room, because he couldn’t hear anything through the walls and there were no windows for him to judge the light. There was only the industrial strip lighting on the ceiling, glinting off that fucking guillotine on the other side of the room. There was no medical equipment, none of the apparatus that would turn it into a surgical procedure. Just that oddly shimmering metal, glimmering, nauseating, disgusting.

“It’ll kill us,” he murmured.

“Yes,” she said simply.

He let out a long shaky breath. “Well then. We gotta just get round them.”

“Sure,” she whispered.

His ankles and wrists were bound, and his right forearm had a bullet wound, just too deep to be called a graze. His weapons were all gone, his earpiece too. All they needed to do was to get Thea on one side and him on the other, and then they could drop the blade. Their chances of getting out were slim to none.

“Why do they care this much?” Clint asked. “We’re not - important, why not just kill us? Or even just torture us? What do they want?”

“Natasha,” said Thea. “They mentioned her.”

“Information, or just her?”

There was no way of knowing.

“We’re not giving her up,” Thea said.

The door opened, and there she was.

“So you have found Hawkeye,” Natasha said archly to the man behind her. “I’m impressed.”

Clint stared. What the hell?

“We had a feeling it would draw you out,” said the man - not Kovács, someone else. He had an accent, but it wasn’t as strong as the man who had captured Clint. Probably five eleven, bald, dressed in a well-tailored suit - important. The real head of the organisation? The fucking massive tiger dæmon suggested he probably was. “I heard he gave you a bit of trouble a little while back.”

“Oh, Imrich, no need to give me presents,” Natasha purred, and then Clint noticed Cassum, not in her hornet form, but a sleek black cat, winding sinuously round Natasha’s ankles, occasionally making overtures to the tiger as if it wasn’t big enough to eat her alive.

“Not so much a present as an incentive,” the guy said. “We thought you might like to see the instrument you brought us put to use.”

Natasha glanced at the guillotine. “Well, it would be a rather overvalued ornament.”

Imrich laughed, and Natasha smiled prettily at him. She was dressed almost as she had been the first time he'd ever seen her, back in a pale pink top, paired with beige slacks which may well have been designer, and carrying herself like a catwalk model on the prowl. Clint had never seen her like this - it was an act, of course it was, but did that mean it wasn’t real? He wanted Thea’s opinion, but she was still hidden inside his shirt, ears quivering.

“And what would you like me to do next, hm?” Natasha asked. Cassum stepped closer to the tiger on dainty paws, only shying away at the very last moment.

“Well, you’ve brought us the instrument. Now we’d like you to bring us its victims.”

“I see,” said Natasha. “You want an army of wiedergänger.”

“Oh, an army is an exaggeration,” said Imrich, and Clint finally lost patience.

“Sorry, I realise I’m just the prisoner in this situation but what the hell are wiedergänger?”

Natasha turned a beatific smile on him. “Shall we tell him what he’ll be, Imrich?”

Imrich laughed again. “Go ahead, my dear.”

She stepped closer, as did Cassum, stalking towards him. Clint shrank back, but she didn’t react, just kept moving in, crouching down to face him. “Wiedergänger is a German word,” she explained, “but you might know them better as zombies. Take away the dæmon, and a fighter is yours to command, you see. If you have their dæmon, you have them, heart and soul.”

But Cassum was whispering too. “Play along,” she hissed spitefully, quietly, and Clint’s heart skipped a beat.

"Fuck you," Clint said.

"No thank you," said Natasha. She straightened up and in a single, beautiful motion, took out Imrich with a roundhouse kick to the temple. The tiger slumped and then Cassum was on it, seemingly disappearing entirely as she landed - ah, a scorpion, Clint could see her now, digging her tail into the big cat's neck, and then flicking back into a cat as she leapt off again, using her momentum to push the tiger to the floor.

"SHIELD are on their way," Natasha said shortly, and that was the voice he knew. She pulled a knife from inside Imrich's jacket and set about sawing through the ropes round Clint's ankles, and then his wrists, dragging him up as she did so. Thea slipped out and to the floor, keeping close to his ankles.

"So glad to see you," he said.

"Shut up and run," she snapped. She stamped on Imrich's neck, which gave with a sickening crack.

"But the guillotine-" cried Thea.

"No time," Cassum hissed from the door. "Quick, quick!"

Clint kept an eye on Imrich as they ran, but his dæmon was already fading away into nothingness. There was no need to worry about him.

Three guards outside the door - Natasha wrenched one’s neck and pushed him into the path of another - Cassum was a wolf, was ripping out the throat of an Alsatian, and the third went down with a gun pointed directly at Clint - the second recovered, pushing the body off him and his dæmon was a baboon, reaching out for Thea, who skipped out of the way, and Clint grabbed the gun from the dead man’s hand and shot, left-handed, straight between the eyes, and the baboon vanished.

A clear corridor, but Natasha was opening a door to the right - emergency stairwell, and they ran up, up - Clint’s head was spinning but the adrenaline would keep him going, it always had before - and there, a window, and Cassum was a pangolin, curled into a ball - Natasha grabbed her and threw her at the glass, which shattered - Thea gasped but Cassum was already a cat again, twisting to land on her feet, they were only on the ground floor - Natasha pushed Clint out in front of her and Thea leapt through with them, accidentally brushing Natasha’s side, but there was no time to react -

They were behind the building, and it was badly guarded; Natasha must have scoped out this place before walking in. She held out a hand to keep him in place for a moment while Cassum darted into the air as a fly to take a look around - Clint had never seen any child's dæmon flick between forms so fast - and then she was motioning him forwards.

Clint tried to get his bearings. They were clearly still in the city, some industrial sector that he didn't know but that Natasha obviously did. She led him round the back of an outbuilding and into an alleyway at a brisk pace, and he followed silently, trusting her to know where she was going until they reached a more commercial area. The sun had set, although probably only an hour or so ago - he'd been unconscious for several hours then, plus the time he'd spent awake and waiting, although yeah, of course he had if Natasha'd had the time to get to him - and there was a reasonable crowd of people milling around. They passed a bench with two teenagers very much wrapped up in each other, and Natasha snatched the boy's jacket where he'd laid it over the back of the bench.

"Put this on," she murmured, handing it to Clint.

She pulled an elastic from her pocket and twisted her hair up into a bun, which didn't do much to hide the colour, but as soon as Clint had the jacket on she took his left hand and smiled sweetly at him, and suddenly she was a whole new person all over again. Cassum was a butterfly, fluttering pleasantly by Natasha's head; Thea attempted to loosen up, skipping at Clint's side.

"We need to get inside," Natasha said happily, as if commenting on the mild autumn evening.

"True," he smiled. "There's a SHIELD safehouse-"

"Oh no," she laughed. "Let's go somewhere else."

Had it been compromised? He looked around the shops and the apartments above them, most with lights on inside, but - yes, there was a barbershop a few yards down with a sign marking it closed, and the curtains of the windows above it drawn. The sign was in Hungarian, which Clint didn't speak beyond a few key phrases, but there were dates underneath - the owner must be away on holiday.

"Follow me," he told Natasha, and pulled her gently down an alley between the barbershop and its neighbour. There was a gate leading into a small scrubby yard which was easily scaled even one-handed after a quick check for onlookers, and yes, there was a backdoor leading up to the second floor.

"Good call," she muttered. She took a lock-picking kit - his old kit, if he wasn't much mistaken - out of her pocket and quickly jimmied the door open. "Go to the bathroom."

He did as he was told, quickly taking in the layout of the apartment as he went. The kitchen and sitting room were at the back of the building, overlooking the yard; he had to go through the bedroom to get to the bathroom, both at the front of the house. He resisted the temptation to check the street from the window; he wasn’t sure if anyone would be watching, but it would be a rookie error to give themselves away by a twitching curtain.

Natasha gave him a few minutes before coming in after him, setting down a glass of water by the sink.

"Drink that," she said. "It's got sugar and salt in it."

Clint took the glass and started sipping as Cassum went to duck under the net curtains as a tiny hummingbird to look out over the street and Natasha started digging through the cabinets for a first aid kit. When she came up with one, he sat on the edge of the bathtub and started to peel his stolen jacket off, wincing now he didn't have the adrenaline to distract him from the bullet graze on his right arm. It didn't look too bad, but it was still gently oozing blood, which meant he'd probably lost quite a lot just from the amount of time that had passed since he'd been shot. It was dirty, too.

"Tetanus shot would be nice," said Thea, nosing just below it.

Natasha exhaled in a sound that would be a snort if it were any stronger. "Alcoholic wipes it is."

Thea skittered back to let Natasha sit at Clint's side. He hissed as she began cleaning the wound, and he half-expected her to mock him for it, but she just kept her eyes on the movement of her fingers over his arm.

He cleared his throat. "What's our next move then?"

"Well, your first move should be getting back to SHIELD so they can call off the team searching for you," Natasha said brusquely. "There's a SHIELD jet at the airport - get yourself there and get on it, the pilot will still be there, he can recall the rest of the team. You can tell them I was right about Imrich Zupan too."

"Why can't you do it?" he asked.

She actually laughed, short, sharp. "They have orders to shoot me on sight."

God, his mind was blurry. "What? Why?"

She shook her head. "Unimportant."

"Yeah, I think that's pretty damn important."

He put his hand over her wrist and she stilled. A flutter of the curtain had them both looking sharply to the window, but it was only Cassum, who flew over to where Thea was sitting at Clint's side and changed into a mouse of all things.

"Maria Hill let us go against orders," she said quietly. "They think we set up this whole mission to get you captured but she believed us when we said we could get you home. We stowed away on the plane."

"We were halfway over the Atlantic before they got the message that I'd escaped," Natasha continued. "Hill told them I escaped from our rooms after she'd left me there - they must have believed her instead of checking the cameras. So now all SHIELD agents in Europe and the US have orders to shoot me on sight." She smiled mirthlessly. "I don't think they'll be following your example of bringing me in instead."

"And they know about me now, so I'm useless as a disguise," Cassum finished.

She inched closer to Thea and, for the first time, reached out to touch her, laying her head on Thea's paw. Thea drew in a breath.

"What are you intending to do?" Clint asked.

Natasha looked down at his arm. "Destroy that guillotine. And then..."

"No," snapped Thea. "You're not getting someone to finish our job."

Natasha didn't say anything. Cassum curled closer into Thea.

Clint wanted to grab Natasha's arm, wanted to force her to look at him. He settled for raising a hand to her face, brushing her hair behind her ear.

"Please don't do that," he said softly.

She didn't move away.

"Natasha, please. I can tell them what really happened. Maria Hill can back me up, now you've gotten me out. Coulson would-"

"Coulson was the one who ordered me locked up," she interrupted, almost gently.

Clint shook his head, lowering his hand. "He listened to me before-"

"-and now you've worn out his patience."

"If we haven't done it in the last five years, I don't think we ever will," Thea argued, with more confidence than Clint could muster up.

"And the rest of them?" Natasha asked. "They'll never trust me, I can't go back."

"But if we can just get the kill order reversed-"

"And I go back to acquiring guillotines for drug lords?" Natasha asked, raising an eyebrow.

"No, you live a life," Clint said. "Settle somewhere, maybe here in Europe, get a job - I don't know, what do you actually want to do?"

She looked at him as if he were a child who had just said something faintly ridiculous. Clint was about to ask why when Cassum spoke up.

"No one's ever asked us that before," she noted lightly.

Thea's ears twitched. "Coulson was the first person to ask us, at least since our mother died."

Natasha's face went curiously blank at that. Clint pressed the advantage. "Look, just let me phone him, and if he-"

"I'm not making a deal with you," she said fiercely.

"I'm not asking you to, just wait to make a decision," he said. "Please, Nat."

She set down the dirty wipe and took a dressing from the first aid kit, unwrapping it and pressing it to his arm. She didn't speak again until it was securely taped in place.

"Alright," she said. "You know his personal phone number?"

"Since before he actually gave it to us," Thea confirmed.

That at least got a smile out of her, and Cassum shifted back from Thea, switching back into the cat she'd been at the beginning of this whole saga. "There's a phone in the sitting room, and one in the bedroom."

Neither was cordless, sadly, so Natasha went through to the bedroom, leaving Clint in the sitting room. Thea hopped into his lap as he dialled Coulson's number.

"Okay, you can pick up now," he called to Natasha, just before the ringtone cut out and Coulson picked up.

"Hello?"

"Sir, Hawkeye reporting. I'm out, I'm safe, stand down the extraction team."

"Hawkeye," Coulson said, and Clint could hear the relief in his voice, but then immediately he was back to business: "Listen, Romanoff has gone AWOL, she shouldn't have had time to get to Hungary yet but she may be targeting you-"

"Yeah, about that," Clint interrupted. "She's here. Say hi, Nat."

"Sir," said Natasha.

Coulson must have been too shocked to respond immediately; Clint pressed the advantage. "She went AWOL to save me, sir. She knew these people, knew what they were going to do to me."

"Suspected," Natasha corrected.

"And how am I to believe that you don't have your own agenda?" Coulson asked.

"Zupan was trying to offer me a job. I killed him and got Hawkeye out," Natasha said flatly. "Of course, I could have another agenda as yet unknown."

Thea's nose twitched uneasily at her sarcasm.

"Sir," said Clint. "I'm asking you to trust me. She's just saved my - well, we'll stick with 'life' over an unsecure line."

"Just make a decision," Natasha spat suddenly. "Either reverse the kill order or don't, but-"

"How do you know about that?"

“I was onboard the plane you sent with the extraction team,” she said. “They weren’t quiet about it when they got the message.”

Clint wished he could see her face. “Sir, you trusted me when you brought me in. Hasn’t she proved-”

“I’m not having this conversation over an unsecure line. We can finish this discussion when you get ho-”

The line cut.

In under a second, Natasha was back in the room with him, throwing him a knife - she must have picked a couple up when she was in the kitchen. Cassum sprinted to the window, leaping up to look.

“SHIELD,” she spat. “Too late.”

“Stay behind me, let me talk to them,” Clint said.

But Natasha didn’t bother listening. She darted back out of the room, to the bedroom and there were two loud bangs at once - the door downstairs, and what must be the bedroom window.

“Hold your fire!” Clint shouted, running after her, but either the operatives outside didn’t hear him or ignored him - a crackle of gunfire sounded outside. “This is Agent Barton, hold your fucking fire!” He went to look out the window, to climb out and follow her, and only Thea tugging at his ankles made him realise that it would be a miracle if he didn’t get shot.

“Agent Barton!”

The agent who arrived in the bedroom first was a woman he’d worked with before and never got on with - Victoria Hand was brilliant, but she was both ruthless and stubborn, neither of which were going to be useful traits in this situation. Her pitbull dæmon was growling at her side, but Thea held her ground and stared him down.

“Agent Hand, call off the kill order on Romanoff,” he demanded. “Get in touch with Coulson, he’ll second that - Natasha Romanoff is not a hostile.”

She glared at him, but raised a hand to her comm. “Sir, we’ve found Hawkeye. He’s insisting Romanoff is not a hostile and should not be terminated.”

She waited for a response. Clint was almost vibrating with tension, Thea fidgeting at his side.

“Wilco,” she said eventually, and flicked a button. “All agents, the Black Widow is not a hostile, repeat, is not a hostile, do not engage. Over.”

Thea let out a little noise of relief.

“Thank you,” Clint said. “What are your orders?”

“To get you out,” answered Hand. “Come on, let’s go.”

Clint grimaced. “Ah, see, that’s where we’re gonna hit a problem.” He paused. “Actually, you don’t happen to have any energy bars with you, do you? Haven’t eaten in a while, could use the calories.”

She glared at him, but chucked him a couple of meal replacement bars. “What problem?”

He stowed the bars in a pocket. “I’m going after her,” he said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Hand snapped.

“There’s a guillotine in this city with no clear owner,” Clint said. “We can’t let that stand.”

“Not my problem,” said Hand.

“We’re SHIELD, we protect people, of course it’s our problem,” Clint argued.

“Not right now it isn’t,” she said firmly. “Not without a plan, and more than six agents who were cobbled together from whoever was free when you got yourself captured.”

Clint stared at her, thinking fast, but he couldn’t see a way to convince her. Sad thing was that she had a point. Going into an organisation which was totally down with severing people, and which had very recently lost its head, with practically no operatives and absolutely no plan…

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll come. But look, Zupan’s lot know I’ve escaped - no offence to yourself, but I’d rather be armed for this journey.”

“You think we were gonna let you be useless the entire time?” she said. “Parslow! Get that bow and quiver up here.”

“You brought a bow?”

Hand rolled her eyes. “Parslow’s a fanboy, grabbed one from the range on his way to the jet.”

Parslow was definitely a boy, as it turned out, probably only twenty years old, fresh out of training. His dæmon was a small lizard, skittering across the floor in nervous excitement.

“Sir,” the boy said somewhat breathlessly, holding out the bow and quiver.

“Thanks, Parslow,” Clint grinned, slinging the quiver over his shoulder. “And by the way, sorry about this.”

Before Parslow could react, Clint used the bow to push him backwards, stumbling right into Hand who in turn tumbled to the floor. Her dæmon was racing towards Thea, but she had already leapt up on the windowsill, and then Clint was swinging out after her, hanging down until he was low as possible before letting go. He crumpled and rolled upon landing, and then he was sprinting, ignoring his lightheadedness and the pain in his arm, following Thea as she headed -

“Wrong way!” he gasped.

“Leading SHIELD the wrong way!” she corrected. “Come on!”

~

Getting back into Zupan’s base had actually been easier than getting out of it the first time. The place was in utter chaos; it had been a moment’s work for Natasha to take down a young man, likely still in his teens, steal his gun, and take his outer clothes too. She left her own slacks and blouse next to his unconscious body and for a moment wondered idly if his pride would let him wear a pink women's blouse. After that, it was just a case of keeping her head down and moving with purpose. Cassum took the form of an Alsatian - big enough to deter people from engaging her, not outlandish enough to draw attention.

The guillotine hadn’t been moved. It wasn’t even heavily guarded, just two men outside its door. Natasha considered her chances of convincing them to let her pass, then the probability of a gunshot being investigated.

“Deathstalker,” she whispered to Cassum.

In an instant the Alsatian was replaced by a small yellowish scorpion. She scuttled round the corner towards the men, keeping to the shadows. Natasha could feel the stretch - they were almost seven metres apart, pushing their limits - but then Cassum had stung the first man’s fox dæmon, who collapsed in pain, and Natasha could dart forward to take out the other man, dodging around him to leap up on his back and wrench his neck. She looked to the other man, but he was dead too, Cassum as a wolf standing where his dæmon had been.

“We need to move them,” said Cassum. “They’ll draw attention.”

Natasha considered quickly. “Get the door.”

It wasn’t even locked. Cassum pushed it open to find Zupan’s body still there; Natasha dragged the other two on top of him, packing them neatly into a corner.

The guillotine glimmered on the other side of the room.

“How do we destroy it?” Cassum asked.

Natasha shrugged. “It’s metal. Heat?”

“Would it work if it wasn’t sharp?”

“What, just sand it down?” Natasha asked. “I don’t know.”

She stepped closer and bent down to look more closely at its edge. She hadn’t bothered to examine it all that closely when she procured it for Zupan, only enough to ascertain what it looked like so she could have a replica made. The museum in Nuremberg had never reported it missing, as far as she knew, likely because no one wanted to go close enough to realise that the sheen wasn’t quite right. That had made everything very easy for Natasha back then, and it was making things easier for her now. Anyone with any sense would have moved the guillotine, would have put a guard inside the room with it, but such was people’s fear of it…

It was an odd metal. It looked as though it were covered with some sort of pearlescent glaze, faintly colourful under the utilitarian lighting. The edge was infinitely sharp - she couldn’t even see it, it was that fine. She wondered if Clint would be able to.

“Does it even behave like a normal metal?” she wondered. She touched the tip of one finger to the sheet and flinched back.

“Cold,” she said. “Too cold.”

Cassum came to her side, and Natasha sank her fingers into her thick fur. Her index finger felt almost numb, just from that brief touch.

“I think we have to accept that it won’t obey the normal rules of physics,” Cassum said.

Natasha nodded. “So how…”

She took out the kitchen knife she’d taken from the barbershop apartment and dragged it over the surface. There was no sound, no screech of metal on metal; the knife slid over it as if held away by a sheet of oil, no matter how hard she pressed. Curious, Natasha tested its edge against the blade of the knife and then recoiled when the guillotine cut through the stainless steel as easily as it might through butter.

“Nice going,” Cassum muttered. “Good thing we took that gun.”

Natasha let the bladeless handle fall to the ground, useless. “How do we do this?”

“Was kinda hoping you’d have an idea there.”

Natasha whirled around to face Clint where he was leaning casually in the doorway. “What the hell are you doing here?” she demanded.

“Helping,” he said, closing the door behind him. “Kill order’s been called off, although we are now both technically AWOL. Here.”

He threw her a protein bar and she caught it, realising how hungry she was. She hadn’t eaten since leaving SHIELD to get to Clint. Neither had he, of course, and he was injured.

“You should have gone with them,” she said, tearing into the bar. “You need medical attention. I can handle this.”

“Yeah, and then I’d never see you again,” he argued. “Anyway, I’m here now. So, no ideas about how to destroy that thing?”

“Like maybe throwing it in an active volcano?” Thea added.

“Your geography is lacking,” Natasha shot back.

“Best idea so far though,” said Cassum.

Clint edged further into the room, staying well back from the guillotine. “I’m in favour of a massive explosion.”

“Again with the lack of practicality-”

“Shh,” Thea interrupted, her ears pricking up.

They froze, and it quickly became clear what Thea had heard - boots, lots of them, and shouts in three languages - Hungarian, Slovak and English.

Natasha cursed. "You led them here?"

"We lost them, I could swear it!" said Thea.

"Then they finally got a decent researcher on the job," said Cassum. "Can we use them?"

Clint made a face - wrong choice of verb - and Natasha shook her head. "Only if we get rid of all Zupan's-"

The door burst open, and all hell broke loose.

People poured into the room in a steady stream, guns ablaze, and for a few minutes it was all Natasha could do to make sure she wasn't killing SHIELD agents - she didn't know these people - did she even care? Was she ever going back, did it matter? The guillotine sat in the centre of a dead spot - at first it was just empty, and then it began to fill up with bodies that fell backwards towards it - Clint was at her back, and it felt oddly natural after all those weeks sparring against each other - she could feel the movement of him pulling arrows from his quiver, wrong-handed -

And then a bullet hit the light.

The tube exploded in a shower of sparks; Natasha could feel them skittering over her skin. Then they were in darkness.

"Stay behind me," said Clint.

She would if she knew where he was. She pressed back, felt him against her, but someone else had lost their bearings and was falling forwards, into her. She didn't know if they were man, woman, old, young, let alone if they were SHIELD or not - she pushed them off with a jab to the throat which would take them out at least for a moment, but Clint had moved back too, and their ankles tangled, and he fell, he fell past her, and then -

A hideous clang. Natasha had never heard a noise so inherently nauseating, though she couldn't say what made it so. All around her there were screams of fear, but she couldn't hear, couldn't hear -

"Clint!" she shouted. And then, "Thea!"

Cassum was a biting insect of some kind, and Natasha felt the bite above her collarbone, felt connected, felt whole, felt alive. She fell to her knees, scrabbled around on the floor, and she found him, found his bare skin - he'd never put the jacket back on -

"Clint!"

He was gasping, he was alive, he was silent - where was Thea?

Sudden light - someone had found the door and now they were flooding out, SHIELD agents and Zupan's lot alike, running away.

"Thea!" she shouted again.

And then she saw her, lying limp on the ground, eyes glassy and unfocused.

She was on the other side of the guillotine.

The guillotine, which had destroyed itself in the end with the force of its own descent. The frame was mostly intact, but shards of metal lay around them, beneath them, reflecting the light in a hideous scattered pattern across the ceiling.

"Thea," she said. And then, "Cassum."

The sting vanished, and as Cassum leapt away she became a chimpanzee, to scoop Thea up and bring her to Clint. Between them, Cassum and Natasha held Thea and Clint together on a bed of shattered metal.

“Please,” said Cassum.

Natasha didn’t know what she was asking for.

A shadow fell over them and Natasha looked up, a snarl ready on her lips, but she was met with raised hands. The woman who stood above her had long brown hair and a pitbull dæmon treading gingerly on the spaces between shards.

“Agent Romanoff,” she said in greeting. “I’m Agent Hand. Can your dæmon carry Barton’s?”

Natasha nodded. “I don’t know if they’ll survive a cross-continental trip.”

The agent lowered her hands. “There’s a SHIELD medical base in Zurich. We’ll take them there. I’d take them to a hospital here, but I think we should keep this in-house.”

Natasha looked down at Clint. His eyes were open, but unfocused. He looked like he wasn’t there in his body. “Yes,” she agreed. She cleared her throat. “Do you have a line to Coulson? He should meet us there."

 


	3. Chapter 3

"Agents Barton and Romanoff have been retrieved, and the artefact has been destroyed. Three operatives lost: Bauer, Delgado, and Parslow. We were unable to recover the bodies."

Phil let out his breath for what felt like the first time in hours as the message came through his earpiece. "Thank you, Agent Hand. Status of the asset?"

"Romanoff is fine," she said.

"I meant Barton," said Phil.

There was a pause. "Stable. Currently unconscious, GSW to the right forearm, dehydrated, and-"

She was interrupted by a quiet voice in the background. Phil couldn't make out the words or who was speaking. He waited patiently, but when Hand spoke again, it was with a softer tone.

"Agent Coulson, we're en route to the Trauma Zentrum. You need to be here when Barton wakes up. Either myself or Agent Romanoff will explain his status to you in person."

A wave of cold rushed over him. "You said he was stable."

"He is, and he's in no further danger."

"Then-"

"Phil. You can work it out. I'm not saying it on a recorded transmission."

He put his hand out for Alevrie; she stretched up to meet him. "Roger that. Over and out."

Alevrie didn't say a word as Phil wrote out a note to leave with Fury's secretary to the effect that he was taking an indeterminate period of leave. He stopped by his apartment and picked up a few changes of clothes, toiletries, et cetera, and then made his way to Dulles International.

“How quickly can I get to Zurich?” he asked the lady at the ticket desk, and an hour and the better part of two and a half thousand dollars later, he was on a plane.

The flight was eight hours long. Phil slept for most of it, Alevrie a familiar, heavy weight on his lap, and then he was out through passport control at Flughafen Zürich and in a taxi to the Trauma Zentrum. He was quickly passed from the receptionist to a doctor named Grumman, who spoke with an English accent and had a bird dæmon, unusual in Western doctors.

“You’re down as Agent Barton’s next of kin, is that correct?” he asked.

“Yes,” Phil affirmed. “He doesn’t have family.”

Dr Grumman nodded. “Agent Coulson, I’ll be frank with you: I have little to no idea if he’ll still be the same person he was. The records of patients who have undergone intercision are historical and wildly variable. There hasn’t been a true case in over half a century, just the very occasional human and dæmon being physically torn apart, which has almost always resulted in immediate death. Agent Barton does not seem to be in danger of that, but there’s no medical reason for him not to have woken up yet. We just don’t know.”

“I see,” said Phil. “Have the members of staff here signed an NDA as to Agent Barton’s status?”

Dr Grumman frowned, and his dæmon ruffled her feathers. “We’re all agents of SHIELD here, and we do respect patient confidentiality.”

“Nevertheless. I’ll have one drawn up.”

Dr Grumman raised an eyebrow. “Yes, sir. Agent Barton’s room is down this way, if you’ll follow me.”

“Is anyone with him?” Phil asked as they walked.

“Agent Hand has just gone to get some sleep. Agent Romanoff seems to regard sleep as being only for the deserving.”

Phil didn’t have anything to say to that, so he kept quiet. The doctor led him through wide airy corridors to the back of the building, a series of private rooms. Only one door was closed; the other rooms were all unoccupied.

“Here we are,” said Grumman. “The nurse will check in every half-hour. The call button is by the bed.”

And there he was, tucked up in a white hospital bed, looking for all the world as if he were just asleep. His arms were resting above the sheets, a fresh dressing over what must be the gunshot wound on his right, and an IV going into his left, and Thea was tucked under the sheet, under his shirt too by the looks of it, her head poking out of the collar to lay atop his neck.

They looked fine. Maybe a little pale, maybe a little still, but Phil had been expecting something different. He wasn’t sure what. He was expecting more visible damage, more signs of change - he was expecting more.

Romanoff was sat at his bedside, her back to the door. She didn’t look around, but waited until the door had closed behind the doctor before speaking. “Funny,” she said. “I wasn’t sure if you’d come.”

Phil didn’t respond.

“You SHIELD agents, you like things you can understand, things which you can make fit into your worldview. You don’t hate me because I’m evil, you hate me because I’m unnatural. Your dæmon never took her eyes off mine in that gym. We did notice. And you hate me because you thought I would get Clint hurt.”

Only then did she turn to face him. Her dæmon was a snake, and she was wrapped around her neck like a collar, or a noose. “And here we are. Between the two of us, we got him severed.”

Phil dragged his eyes up to meet her gaze. “This was not my fault.”

“No?” she asked. “You sent him in with bad intel. You weren’t quick enough to accept his version of events over the phone, forcing me to leave without him, leading to him following me back to Zupan’s base. You sent in the team which started a firefight in a small room with a guillotine at its centre.”

“You said you could get him out,” Phil argued.

“And you promised you would always bring him home,” she countered. “We both did our jobs. We just failed to get him out and bring him home in one piece.”

Phil didn’t know how to respond to that. He moved to the other side of the bed and sat in the plastic chair opposite to Romanoff’s.

“Do I still get a reevaluation?” she asked after a pause.

“Probably,” said Phil. “But so does he.”

She nodded, and they settled in to sit vigil.

~

Waking up was a slow and arduous process. Thea felt lethargic, and numb, like she wasn't quite connected to her own body. She stretched and found herself confined under cotton, constrained. She was under a sheet, and on top of -

She panicked. She squealed and scrabbled to get out, out, off - where was she, who was that? Who was this human she was lying on? She leapt and fell to the floor, but then she was being swept into warm arms.

"Calm down, calm down, you're alright," said - was that -

"Cassum?" she asked.

"Yes," she said. "Now breathe."

She could do that. She opened her eyes and took in the scene around her. Natasha was crouched by the door, ready to block an exit. Coulson and Alevrie were on their feet on the other side of the room, a hospital room she saw now, watching her with wide eyes. Cassum was a chimpanzee, holding her carefully. And on the bed -

"That was Clint?" she said. "But it didn't feel-"

"Thea, do you remember what happened?" Coulson asked gently.

She tried to think. "We came back for Natasha. Zupan's guards and the SHIELD team came in - are they alright, who got out?"

"We lost three," said Alevrie. Her voice was low and steady; Thea had never heard it before. "Bauer, Delgado and Parslow. The others are all fine. But you..."

"The guillotine," said Thea. "Clint."

She tore herself out of Cassum's arms and leapt back onto the bed, but stopped short of stepping onto his body. "Is he hurt? Why don't I know? I should know this."

"Careful of his right arm," said Natasha.

But she couldn't do it. "Feels like he's not mine," she said. "Like I shouldn't touch him."

"Try," said Cassum.

"You don't have to," said Coulson, but Alevrie spoke over him. "No, but do."

Tentatively, she reached out a single paw and laid it on Clint's left forearm. It didn't feel wrong, like she imagined touching someone else's human would. It just didn't feel right, either.

"We're severed," she said aloud.

"Yes," said Natasha.

Thea whimpered. "No," she said. "I can't. I don't want to live like this."

"Well you're going to," said Cassum. "Because otherwise you're killing him."

She couldn't deal with this. She stared at Clint's face. "I've never seen him asleep," she said. "Why isn't he awake?"

"You're separated now," Alevrie said gently. She had clambered onto Coulson's chair so she could see, leaving him standing above them. "Looks like you don't have to sleep at the same time any more."

Cassum swung up onto the bed, carefully avoiding Clint's legs, and laid a hand between Thea's shoulders. "You're not alone," she said bluntly.

"And neither is he," Coulson promised.

It was impossible to believe. She was staring at Clint, watching him. She'd never done that before, never had to look at him to know exactly what he was doing and how he was feeling at any given time.

Thea stepped out from under Cassum's hand and laid down on Clint's torso. She could feel his heart beating against her chest, and tried to believe she was still settled inside it.

The door opened suddenly, and Thea looked up. It was a nurse, a middle-aged woman with short black hair and a little trotting guinea pig dæmon by her side.

"Ah, you are awake," she said in a German accent, and it took a moment for Thea to realise that she would have to respond. That was always Clint's role, to talk to people they didn't trust. She sent a pleading look to Coulson.

“Just Thea so far,” he said to the nurse. “Clint’s still asleep.”

She sniffed. “I see. And Thea, how do you feel?”

It was no use avoiding it. She sat up and faced the nurse. “Fine,” she said, and then reconsidered. “Disconnected. But I guess that’s logical.”

“You tell us everything,” the nurse said sternly. “We cannot help you if we don’t know what the problem is.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Thea.

Something about the woman was sort of comforting, maybe the way she was giving clear instructions. It was no good being given vague assurances of support; she couldn’t focus constructively on those. She needed to be given something to do, something to concentrate on, like she’d always concentrated on Clint.

As soon as that thought occurred to her, she shivered, thinking about what Natasha said about zombies. _Take away the dæmon, and a fighter is yours to command, you see. If you have their dæmon, you have them, heart and soul._

“Thea?”

She looked up. “Sorry, what?”

“I asked how do you feel,” said the nurse.

Thea shook her head and raised one leg to scratch at her side, trying to take stock of her body. “Pretty normal, physically. Maybe a bit slow, or numb.”

“And mentally?” Alevrie prodded.

“Terrified,” she blurted out, and then cringed at the outburst, ducking her head. “Lost,” she said, more quietly. “I miss him. When’s he gonna wake up?”

The silence spoke volumes. The nurse bustled over to lay a hand on Clint's forehead and check the connection of the heart monitor and the IV port.

"You don't know," Thea said, carefully swaying out of her way.

"They have no data," said Coulson. "You're the first recorded case in decades."

God, Thea was remembering why they - why she hated medical. She didn't want to be dealing with this, and she didn't want to be stuck in this white room with well-meaning people who couldn't actually fix anything.

"Can I get out of here?" she asked.

Coulson looked shocked, but Natasha was calm. She went to the window behind Alevrie's chair and cracked it open.

"You and Cassum can hop out here for a few minutes. Please stay with her," she said. "That's alright, isn't it, nurse?"

It wasn't a question. The matter-of-fact demeanour vanished in the face of Natasha's hard voice. "Five minutes?" she said.

Natasha smiled. "Danke. Go," she said to Thea. "We'll shout if there's any sign of change."

Leaving Clint should have hurt. It should have been difficult, but Thea jumped off him and straight to the window without feeling so much as a twinge. She and Clint had tested their bond when they were young, like every child did; she knew as immutable fact that she could not go this far from him, and yet she felt nothing.

Cassum became a cat to leap up to the window and out. Thea paused atop the window ledge, but jumped after her. She didn't exactly feel better for being in the open air, but at least she felt free. She stared over the field that bordered the hospital, at trees in the distance whose leaves were just starting to die.

"We're in Switzerland, right?"

"Yes," said Cassum.

Switzerland. A jackrabbit wouldn't stand out here too much; there was nothing stopping her from running. She took a few steps forward.

"Stop."

Cassum was sitting serenely a pace behind her, watching her with narrowed eyes. They were easily five metres from the wall.

"How can you go so far from her?" Thea asked.

"We were stretched daily for about a year when we were a child," Cassum replied.

“Stretched?”

“Pulled apart. They put us in separate boxes and pulled them away from each other, a little more each day.”

Cassum’s tone was even, but Thea shuddered. "And you didn't fight?"

"For a few days, a couple of months in," she said. "We thought we couldn't take it any more. We learned that we were wrong."

"You're really not a comforting presence, you know that?" said Thea.

"You ask terrible questions, you know that?"

"I don't know that," Thea realised. "I don't ask the questions, Clint does. I've never had a conversation without him."

Cassum paused. "You're both going to have to work out how to function individually, and as a unit. You can do that, though."

She didn't frame that as an opinion. Thea wondered how she could be so sure, when she was talking about two new people where before there had been one.

"They'll call us if there's a change, won't they?"

Cassum nodded.

"Let's stay here for a bit."

~

Phil had to turn away when the two dæmons left the room, gagging slightly. A human without a dæmon - the word 'disgusting' flitted through his brain before he could stop it.

"Get over it," Romanoff said sharply. "Now."

He put a hand to his mouth and forced himself to look back at Barton. If he didn't think about it, he could almost convince himself that Thea was just hiding under the bed.

The nurse was white as a sheet. "I will be back in thirty minutes," she said, and then hurried out the room.

Alevrie was staring at the open window. "I can't understand why she wanted to leave."

"Then you're not trying very hard," Romanoff snapped.

"Stop it," said Phil. "There's no need for that."

She didn't acknowledge the reprimand beyond a silent glare. She settled down on the floor, her back to the exterior wall, minimising the distance between herself and her dæmon. It was one of very few concessions Phil had ever seen her give to being human.

"You should sleep," he said.

"Not while he might wake up," she countered.

Phil had spent the last few months worrying that Romanoff was getting her claws into Barton, drawing him away from SHIELD, away from the principles he'd been living by for years. Clearly he'd been worrying about the wrong person; it looked like Barton had gotten his claws into Romanoff instead.

"You actually care about him," he said, not bothering to hide his surprise.

"I owe him," she corrected. "More than I could possibly repay at this point."

They lapsed into silence. Phil moved over to the chair that Romanoff had vacated, Alevrie settling half on top of his feet, and they all three settled into watching Barton.

Five minutes passed, then ten. Phil was used to waiting on Barton, and even waiting on Barton to wake up in medical. At least this time he knew that Thea was alright, but did that mean anything for Clint any more? Alevrie kept glancing between the bed and the window, uneasy.

After another ten minutes, Phil cleared his throat. "You should call them back in. The nurse will be back soon."

Romanoff stood up and leant out the window to call her dæmon's name. When she moved away a second later, she had Cassum in her arms.

Thea clambered back in unaided. "Any change?"

Phil shook his head, and Thea slammed her foot against the glass. No one jumped, but Phil was prepared to bet that he wasn't the only one suppressing the instinct. She jumped this time onto the bed by Barton's head, looking down at his face, but immediately raised her head to look at the door.

"That's not the nurse," she said, and in a flash Cassum was back on the floor, fur standing on end.

"Probably the doctor," Phil said quietly, and sure enough the door opened to reveal Dr Grumman.

"Agent Coulson, Agent Romanoff," he said. There was a short pause before he added, "Thea."

She shifted uneasily. "Doctor."

"Nurse Meier told me you were awake. That being the case, I'm becoming more concerned about Agent Barton remaining unconscious, so we're going to start testing him to see if we can get a reaction of some sort."

"As for potentially brain damaged patients," Phil said.

Dr Grumman shot him a glance. "You know what to expect, then."

"Yes." He'd sat by Nick's bedside when he lost that eye after a massive head trauma, and he'd hoped he'd never have to do it again.

Romanoff was still, poised as if on the edge of fight or flight, but she kept her eyes on Dr Grumman as he moved towards the bed. He ignored her, instead turning back to Thea.

"I'm going to start off by asking him a few questions, ask him to complete simple tasks. Alright?"

She nodded, and shifted back on the pillow.

"Right then. Clint? Can you open your eyes for me?"

Nothing.

"Can you tell me your dæmon's name?"

Nothing.

"Alright Clint, I'm putting my fingers in your hands. Can you squeeze my fingers?"

"Sorry, what's the point of this?" Thea asked. "It's pretty damn clear he's not hearing you."

"It's an escalating use of the senses," Dr Grumman explained. "Sight's out, given that he's not opening his eyes - I'll shine a light in them in a moment. Then hearing. Then touch. Even if he's not hearing my instructions, feeling something against their palms normally makes a patient move their fingers. Unfortunately, nothing so far. So, Clint, I'm going to have to cause you a little bit of pain."

This was the part Phil had been dreading. Watching the nurse dig into a pressure point on Nick's forehead had been bad enough, but worse had been Nick's dæmon's reaction. She'd been unconscious too, mirroring his state, but without the damage that stopped her moving and lashing out instinctively at her human's pain. Too big to be held down by other dæmons, the hospital porters had ended up strapping her to a stretcher as the medical staff continued to try and get a reaction from Nick himself.

Thea's ears twitched, but she didn't protest, so Dr Grumman brought out a penlight and pushed it hard into the space between Clint's eyebrows, twisting it into his skin. And this time, there was a response - his eyes flickered under his eyelids.

"Stop," said Thea. "Please."

Dr Grumman removed the pen immediately. "Did you feel something?"

"No."

Alevrie shivered.

"Sorry," said Thea.

“Don’t apologise,” Cassum said sharply.

Phil couldn't help glancing over at her. He agreed with the sentiment, but the tone was far too harsh. In a way, though, it was a relief to know that Romanoff wasn't dealing with this as well as she pretended.

Suddenly, Alevrie spoke up. "His finger moved."

Thea lifted her ears to their full height, alert. "Clint?" she said. "Come on, man, come back to me." She laid a paw on his cheek, and Phil wanted to turn away from the private moment, but  he couldn't take his eyes off of Barton, whose hands were now moving slowly. He was reaching for the IV port - well, some things never changed.

"Hey, stop that," he said, instinctively reaching for Clint's hand, but Dr Grumman was there before him, holding his wrist gently.

"Agent Barton," he said. "Can you hear me? It's alright, you're alright, you're in the hospital, but you're okay."

Clint's eyes were opening now, and his tongue came out to wet his lips - no, to say, "Thea."

"I'm here," she said. "Clint? Clint, I know it doesn't feel like it, but I'm here."

"Thea," he said again, louder this time. "Thea."

But then his eyes were fully open, and he was clearly distressed, on his way to panicking, even. He jerked his arm out of the doctor's grasp and reached up for Thea, getting his fingers into her fur.

"Hey, hey, Clint, I'm here, it's fine, what's wrong, what hurts?"

He was staring wild-eyed at Thea, watching her face, watching her speak without any sign of understanding, and Phil's heart sank.

"I can't hear you," Clint said. "I can't hear you."

~

Turned out he wasn't deaf.

Or maybe he was, Clint wasn't too clear on the terminology. He just knew he hadn't lost all hearing. He submitted to tests with apathetic obedience, speaking when asked a direct question, and only the direct questions he couldn't pretend he hadn't heard. At the end of it, he was given two placeholder hearing aids, which didn't work like he remembered his ears working. Sounds were different now, with what used to be background noise amplified and outweighing people's voices. His own voice echoed around in his head and sounded weird. It was a great excuse just not to speak.

Natasha and Coulson were always there. So was Thea. It was horrific, realising that that had to be stated now, and couldn't just be assumed. He felt nothing from her, had no idea what she was feeling. He'd never before realised just how much of his emotional state came from her, just how much of himself was wrapped up in her.

She was much more difficult to lip read than a human.

After a few days at the Trauma Zentrum, they flew back to DC, where Natasha was taken away and Clint was presented with new hearing aids. These were smaller, although still positioned behind the ear, and they had apparently been programmed specifically to him and his needs by SHIELD's audiology department. Clint hadn't been aware that there was a SHIELD audiology department, but here they were, doing test after test on him, trying to figure out what had happened. There shouldn't have been that much damage to his ears. Natasha had been just as close to the guillotine, and Hand only a couple of metres back; the sound hadn't been loud enough to cause damage, and there had been no explosive force or microscopic debris to enter his ear canals. It was just a side effect, but outside of the Zurich team, no medical personnel were cleared to know just what it was a side effect of.

A young English girl named Jemma Simmons, whose first PhD was in sensory neurochemistry and who was apparently researching for a second PhD in human-dæmon biology before entering the Academy proper, was flown in to give her best guess. She looked through all the results everyone else had come up with, shooting anxious glances at Clint throughout, and shook her head.

"I'd have to do an awful lot more testing before I came up with anything conclusive, and I don't think it's exactly ethical," she said to Coulson.

"Give us a wild guess then, and we won't quote you on it."

"Well, alright," she said, flustered. She glanced at her own rabbit dæmon, who had spent the whole time huddled close to her feet. "I think it's rather a coincidence that the sense which was affected was hearing, when Agent Barton's dæmon is a hare."

Coulson's eyes narrowed dangerously. "And what would Agent Barton's dæmon have to do with anything?"

Her eyes widened in fear. "I'm sorry, I just - it's rather obvious. Sorry, Agent Barton," she said to Clint. "I - maybe it isn't obvious to most people, I just, human-dæmon bonds are my area of study. It's - it's - sorry."

"Don't apologise," said Thea.

Clint didn't say anything.

~

Natasha hated being back in isolation, with no sources of information as to what was going on outside her cell. She didn't expect Coulson to visit, of course - he would be with Clint - but when she heard muffled voices outside her door, she thought it might be Hill. She certainly didn’t expect Melinda May to step into the room.

“You missed our sparring session,” she noted.

In a trice, Natasha was on her feet, ready to defend herself, and Cassum was a cougar, baring her teeth against May’s dæmon. But the stallion was too large to fit into the room; May stayed by the door and regarded Natasha with expressionless eyes.

“I’m not here to kill you,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I just retired from active service.”

Natasha didn’t sit down. “Not many get to do that,” she noted.

May nodded. “I would have been a pilot if Capax hadn’t become so big. But we all work with our limitations.”

The horse lowered his head a little.

“Phil’s trying to keep Barton’s status a secret,” May continued.

Natasha narrowed her eyes. “And yet you seem to know. That makes at least seven people already.”

“Eight. A seventeen year old girl figured it out yesterday.”

That made it clear: they were talking about his being severed, not his hearing loss. Natasha nodded. “You know they say the best way to pass information is to tell three people that it’s top secret.” Clint had told her that.

“This time it will work. People see what they want to see.”

“And yet you seem to know,” Natasha repeated deliberately. Cassum swiped her tail.

May waited for a moment before answering. “You and I, we’ve done the unthinkable. We’ve looked at them as targets in isolation. And we know that they are not… facts. They’re not unchanging.”

In Natasha’s world, nothing was a trustworthy fact. She wasn’t sure if that was so extraordinary that it would keep Clint safe.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“Like I said, I’ve retired from active service,” May answered. “I’m in admin now. Agent Coulson’s paperwork has been mostly transferred to me whilst he deals with Hawkeye. I was going through them this morning, and it seems that he’s been trying to register you as an immigrant for months. So, I need to know what form your dæmon’s going to be taking.”

Natasha and Cassum exchanged a glance.

“We get to decide,” Natasha confirmed.

May nodded. “But that means you do have to decide,” she pointed out. “I can’t register you as a child.”

Natasha breathed out slowly. “Right,” she said. “Give us two minutes.”

May raised her eyebrows. “I can give you longer.”

“Five, then,” she said. She couldn’t let herself overthink this decision.

May’s dæmon shook his head a little, but May gave no sign that she had noticed. “I’ll wait outside,” she said.

Cassum flicked into a fox as the door closed. “What, then?” she asked. “We make Natasha Romanoff into its own persona, fine, but who?”

“This is forever,” Natasha said, thinking hard. “In all public places that aren’t SHIELD or on mission. If they keep us.”

“If they let us go, we run,” Cassum stated. “We get our own papers, whenever we can.”

“But if they keep us.”

“So what do we need?”

“Flight?” Natasha asked.

Cassum changed into a bat and fluttered upwards. “Useful,” she said.

“Mammal, then,” said Natasha.

“I think so?”

“You’re most often small, fast-”

Cassum landed, became a hare. “Predator or no? What image do we-”

“I can’t do this.”

Cassum watched her carefully for a moment, and then her ears twitched. “Clint and Thea wouldn’t want this for us.”

And of course it had been the reminder of Thea that had made Natasha realise that she couldn’t make this decision, and of course Cassum becoming a hare had been a deliberate move to evoke Thea, but Natasha couldn’t help but resent that apparently they couldn’t come to this realisation on their own.

“What do we do, then?” she asked.

Cassum looked at her steadily. “Tell them that. And see-”

The door reopened.

“Well?” asked May. She didn’t come fully into the room; her dæmon hooked his head over her shoulder, his nostrils widening when he saw Cassum in her hare form.

“We refuse,” said Natasha.

For the first time, Natasha saw May smile. It was the barest twitching of her mouth, but it was there.

“I’ll stall for now,” she said. “Assuming SHIELD chooses to employ you, I’ll argue for your entire identity being classified. At such a time that you need a passport or some other document, we’ll issue you temporary papers.”

“Is that how they did it for you?” Natasha asked.

“No. I hacked the State Passport Agency and changed my details, then applied for a new passport. It hasn’t come up on anything else so far.”

Her whole life before Bahrain, overwritten. Natasha had signed up to have her past erased, but she thought she had had enough of her present scrubbed out as well.

“And you approve of my answer,” she said to May.

May shrugged. “It’s the clearest sign so far that you’re not playing this as deep cover.”

“It’s the first time I’ve actually been given a choice to make,” Natasha pointed out. “Congratulations on setting up the first controlled trial of my motives.”

If she had been hoping to make May smile again, she failed. Her eyes narrowed infinitesimally, sceptical once again of Natasha’s authenticity. It didn’t matter. This decision had been made. Natasha didn’t work in hypotheticals, but for a moment she was so unbearably tempted to envision the future that could unfold as a result of that decision, the decision to be honest.

And May had shown her hand: Natasha would never have been given this choice if SHIELD hadn’t already decided what to do with her. Moreover, she was sure that they wouldn’t turn her loose on the general population with identity papers that gave a falsified dæmon form, which left two choices: either they were going to bring her into the fold, or they were going to kill her.

She stamped down on the hope and the hypotheticals both, and watched May go. It occurred to her that she shouldn’t want to stay here, even conditionally. Given the examples of May, and now Clint, the ways SHIELD missions had almost destroyed them… And yet. There was something here that before, she had barely had words for. There was community, loyalty, a chance to do - maybe not good. Not unambiguously good, at least, but then Natasha didn’t believe in unambiguous goodness.

There was something here which she couldn’t describe, and she wanted it.

~

Three days after they arrived back, Clint finally received word that he was to have an official debriefing. When he and Coulson arrived outside the conference room, Natasha was there too.

"They let you out of confinement?" Coulson asked.

Natasha nodded. "Apparently the director wants to speak to all of us."

They lapsed into silence, waiting. Thea's ears twitched, maybe trying to listen through the door. Clint wasn't sure.

"They'll fire us," she predicted, suddenly.

"No, they won't," said Coulson.

Natasha's face was blank, but Cassum was nervy, a greenfinch, ruffling her feathers where she perched on Natasha's shoulder.

Eventually the door opened, and Maria Hill came out. She nodded at Natasha first. "Agent Coulson, Agent Romanoff, if you want to wait out here." Only then did she turn to Clint. "Agent Barton, the director will see you now," she said.

She wasn't looking at Thea, Clint noticed, which meant she knew what had happened. He walked just a little bit too close to her to see what she would do, and sure enough she drew back a step. Clint couldn't blame her. He would probably feel disgusted at himself if he had enough energy to feel anything.

Slowly, steadily, he made his way into the room and settled into parade rest in front of the conference table, keeping his eyes down rather than looking for the reaction to Thea.

"Director Fury," he muttered.

"Look at me when you're speaking to me, ain't nothing wrong with your neck," Fury said, but he didn't sound angry. Clint looked up slowly.

"Just didn't expect quite such a fuss for giving me my marching orders," said Clint.

"Now who said anything about that?" said Fury.

Clint wasn't in the mood to be teased. He waited for him to get to the point.

"It's true that SHIELD's never had a severed guy on the books before," Fury said. "But you're definitely not the first wearing hearing aids. More importantly, we've never had a sniper like you before, and it's gonna take you losing both your arms before I reconsider putting you out in the field, are you understanding me, Agent Barton?"

"Yes sir."

Fury waited, but Clint didn't feel like expanding on that. He was kind of surprised when Thea spoke up.

"All due respect sir, we've got weaknesses we didn't have before. Are you intending that I go with him, or is someone gonna be tasked to keep me safe under lock and key?"

That did make Clint tense, but Fury was shaking his head.

"Every body is a liability, human and dæmon alike. If you didn't have any liabilities, you wouldn't have any soldiers. There're advantages to you as well as weaknesses. That's why I'm putting you in a new unit."

Clint nodded.

"Now, I need to speak with Agent Romanoff and Agent Coulson. You two wanna go fetch them."

 _You two._ But at least he was sending them out together. Thea trotted along at his side like she always had as they went to the door, and when they opened it, both Natasha and Coulson got straight to their feet.

"Well?" said Natasha.

"Not fired, being reassigned," he said. "He wants to see you both."

Coulson clapped him on the shoulder as they went back in. "Told you," he said.

Fury was speaking quietly to his dæmon as they went back in; her tail flicked in a broad sweeping movement as she saw Natasha.

"Ms Romanoff," Fury said, and immediately Natasha stiffened. It took Clint a moment to realise that it was because he hadn't called her 'Agent'.

"Director," she said neutrally.

"Have a seat, all of you," he told them. "We got a fair amount of material to get through here. So, Romanoff, starting from the moment that Agent Coulson sent you out the control room, you convinced a senior agent to disregard her direct orders, stowed away on a SHIELD aircraft, undermined an extraction mission and thus ended up getting three of my agents killed, and one of them severed. Any arguments?"

"No, sir."

"Actually, yes," Coulson interrupted. "From her own report, Maria Hill wasn't convinced of anything. It was her own idea to let Romanoff go."

Natasha didn't give any indication of having heard this defence. Cassum was a honeybee now, maybe in deference to the hornet form Fury had imposed on her, maybe because reading an insect's body language was nearly impossible.

"Thank you, Coulson," Fury said. "Romanoff, nothing to say?"

"No, sir," she said.

"Well then, congratulations Agent Romanoff, I am promoting you to a level four specialist, assigned to Strike Team Delta."

Her eyes widened ever so slightly. "Thank you, sir."

"You showed initiative, and went above and beyond in an attempt to save Agent Barton and to destroy a highly dangerous artefact. That being said, you go AWOL like that again and I'll take Bolton's word for it when he tells me you're setting us up, you understand me?"

The corner of her mouth twitched. "Yes, sir. Thank you, sir."

"Agent Barton, you'll be Agent Romanoff's field partner, and Agent Coulson, you are now their dedicated handler. Any questions?"

"Several," said Coulson. "For example, when do you expect us to be field ready?"

"I'm not putting a time frame on you," said Fury. "I expect you to be field ready when Barton says he's field ready and you believe him." He looked at all three of them one by one, his dæmon's gaze sweeping slowly across the room. "I am expecting Strike Team Delta to become legendary. I want you to take on the missions which would be impossible for anyone else, and I want you to make them look easy."

Natasha had something close to a facial expression. "You want me and Barton to use our disabilities for SHIELD."

Clint glanced at her, and Thea's nose twitched. Natasha wasn't talking about his hearing loss. He ran the word 'disabled' through his head again and couldn't decide if it was justified. And Cassum - but Cassum was still a bee, completely unreadable.

"I expect you to use everything you've got for SHIELD," Fury said.

"No," Clint said softly.

The jaguar looked at him with great golden eyes.

"If you ask too much of us, then I'm leaving," he said. "If you ask too much of Natasha, I'll help her get away from you."

Fury regarded him coolly. "And if I ask too much of your handler?"

"Well, I reckon he'd recognise it and you might actually respect him saying no."

"Then you come to me first," Coulson said firmly. "Both of you."

A great rumbling purr made Clint jump as it echoed oddly through his hearing aids; Fury was smirking.

"And this is why you're on the same team. I'm no fool - I know the three of you are loyal to each other before SHIELD. I just happen to believe that makes you into a better unit for SHIELD. Prove me right."

He didn't wait for a response before striding out of the room, holding the door for his dæmon in a vaguely chivalrous gesture.

"So. Strike Team Delta," Thea said.

Natasha was looking at him, Clint knew, but he couldn’t meet her eye. They had a future, the both of them, and it should have been a moment of triumph, but he couldn’t think any further ahead than the next instant. He certainly couldn’t care about it.

~

They ended up back in Coulson's on-site rooms, this time with the locks disengaged. Natasha went and fetched Clint's belongings herself, picking the lock of the specialists' barracks and letting herself in. Clint barely seemed to notice, let alone care, but Thea thanked her.

"You're welcome," Natasha said, and meant it.

That night, Clint woke up shouting. Cassum was out of the door before Natasha, in the form of a ferret, leaping up to swing on Clint's bedroom door handle rather than waiting for Natasha to open it. Natasha flicked on the lights and took in the scene - Clint upright in bed, sweating, shaking, and Thea huddled in the corner of the room, holding one paw up against her body. He must have hit her when he woke.

Resolutely, she walked into the room and sat on the bed in front of Clint. She met his gaze, searching his eyes for a few seconds, and when she was satisfied that he was awake and lucid, she reached over to his bedside table and handed his hearing aids to him.

"Fuck, sorry, you shouldn't have to do this," he said, putting them in. It was perhaps the most emotion she'd heard from him since Budapest, but she didn't draw attention to it. Instead she looked at Cassum, over by the wardrobe with Thea, sitting up to speak softly to her. Natasha's attention was split slightly as her dæmon held her own conversation, but she'd learned to overcome that at an early age. She considered what she wanted to say for a good few moments before turning back to Clint.

“You know I was trained from well before puberty. There were other girls there too, but none of them were quite like me," she said. She glanced again at her dæmon, before turning back so Clint could see her face. "Cassum was already the same gender as me, of course, but when she didn’t settle, and didn’t settle, and didn’t settle, they said it was a triumph. They said that I didn’t have a self. Nothing but the state.” She smiled a little. “They meant nothing but the Department, but they said nothing but the state.”

“Do you believe that?” Thea asked.

The two dæmons had approached the bed. Cassum flowed up onto the bed and into her lap as Natasha considered. “Maybe. Not the part about the Department, not any more, but maybe I don’t have a self. Or maybe I just don’t know what it is, who I am.”

“Maybe you’re just many things,” said Clint.

“Maybe,” she said. She gave a little shake of the head. “You were the first person who even invited me to consider myself as an individual. I don't know if I'll be very good at returning the favour, but I'll try."

He was exhausted, she could see that, and she wasn't surprised when he didn't answer.

"So the first thing we're going to do is learn at least three sign languages, and develop a visual code that Thea can use," she said.

~

_Several years later._

~

Missions in Russia were always Natasha’s favourites. Her reputation here was still legendary, but dulled enough with the passing of time that people had started to believe they could best her, and it was always pleasant to disabuse them of that notion. This general didn’t even know who she was, which was a shame, but he was fully convinced he had her at his mercy and monologuing beautifully. Natasha allowed herself a moment of annoyance when the phone rang - it broke the moment. Cassum was cowering under her chair, a fox for this one, much smaller than the general’s hulking great gorilla dæmon, and even she let out a small whine of disappointment.

But then the call was for her.

“We need you to come in.”

Coulson. Typical.

“Are you kidding, I’m working!” she protested.

“This takes precedence.”

“I’m in the middle of an interrogation and this moron is giving me everything.”

The general’s jaw dropped open. His dæmon moved from foot to foot, uncomfortable. “I don’t give… everything…”

Natasha gave him a look. Well, her cover was blown from the second Coulson had dialed the number. She could still take this guy out and move onto his connections without jeapordising the op. “Look, you can’t pull me out of this right now.”

“Natasha. Barton’s been compromised.”

She tensed. "Let me put you on hold."

There was no grace to the way she took them down. It was quick and dirty; she had no time for this pathetic fight. Cassum flicked between forms like lightning - none of these guys would be alive to let that secret out. Within two minutes she was back on the phone, on speaker so Cassum could hear. She was a lioness now, and still growling softly at the phone.

"Where’s Barton now?”

“We don’t know.”

“But he’s alive?”

There was a pause, and she heard the phone being set on the ground. Another familiar voice.

“Natasha, it’s me.”

Thea.

Cassum flicked her tail. If Thea was still there, still with Coulson, it meant Clint was definitely still alive, but he had left Thea behind. In all this time, neither Clint nor Thea had ever left each other behind, not voluntarily.

“Nice to hear you’re still with us,” Natasha said evenly.

The phone was picked up again. “We’ll brief you on everything when you get back, but first, we need you to talk to the big guy.”

That had to be a joke. "Coulson, you know Stark trusts me about as far as he can throw me." Cassum had been a Siamese cat for Natalie Rushman. When Stark had seen her walk in as herself, with that same Siamese cat by her side, he’d scowled and mumbled something about never trusting a cat dæmon. The fact that his own dæmon was an ocelot was apparently lost on him.

"No, I've got Stark. You get the big guy."

Natasha looked down at Cassum. "Боже мой."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm morpholomeg on tumblr - come say hi if you want. :)

**Author's Note:**

> Additional warnings: Clint undergoes intercision, aka his dæmon is forcibly cut away from him. He also loses his hearing as a result of this. There is talk of dæmons being killed by humans and vice versa, as an escalation of the great taboo of touching another person's dæmon, often seen as allegorical to rape. Natasha has undergone 'stretching', where she and her dæmon were pulled away from each other slowly over a long period of time.


End file.
